They are loaded with advertisements
that's funny. i'm logged into my facebook account right now and after clicking through the various screens i have yet to see a single ad. that's in contrast to myspace, which likes to shove huge flash background advertisements for the latest lame movie all over the place.
the fact is this ToS was just putting in writing something they probably already did. with all the people demanding clear and transparent EULAs,ToS etc. it's ironic that when a company does the right thing, they get blasted for it.
if you're putting your information, content, whatever on a FREE website, you are agreeing to surrender some privacy. Don't like it? DON'T AGREE TO THE ToS and use these sites. All the people that made this such a shit-storm are free to move to some other social site that doesn't do the exact same thing. wait. there isn't one.
so i get up this morning and start googling. whaaaaat? even cnn is malware today. thank god i decided to hit/. to see if anyone else was getting this, i figured if it was google wide, someone here would post it. saved me lots of scanning and wondering wtf is wrong with my pc.
yes, you can turn it off, which makes it even more useless. it's a useful feature on most phones, but as implemented by apple it's obtrusive. it's like apple deliberately went in the opposite direction just to prove they "think different". no other phone I'VE had handles predictive this way and that includes smart phones from nokia, moto, blackberry, samsung and htc. i've been through a pile of them and in most other respects, for me, the iphone beats them hands down.
you know this is what bugs me about apple. the "we know what's best" attitude. I love my iphone, but... it's the little things apple does that annoy. For example, you're composing a text message and as you enter a word, the phone comes up with what it THINKS you're spelling. no biggy, predictive text has been on cell phones for years. where apple manages to screw it up is that unless i tap the suggested word, it replaces what i'm typing, which may not be what i was spelling. On every other phone i've had, it works the other way, if i want to use the suggested word i select it. anyway, the apple method makes for a lot of retypes or excessive tapping and is one of those "leave me alone damn it" features they loooove to put in their products.
I doubt in the current financial climate people are going to be stressing green in their purchases
exactly this. green is all well and good and quite trendy when you have disposable income. Too bad a lot of the products cost so much that unless you're really just doing it for the environment there's no compelling reason to buy. The cost savings rarely outweighs the price premium. These companies are only hoping to milk the cash cow. It's too bad really because everything being 'green' would probably be a good thing.
how about if i press for say 2 seconds at the start of where i want to copy i get a draggable highlight? then i tap the highlighted text after dragging to the end point and it copies. at the other end of the process, how about i hold down for 3 seconds to paste?
seriously, for all the things my iPhone does, i'm still amazed it DOESN'T do cut and paste. Coming from a blackberry, which does cut and paste, i probably notice the lack of it more. it's easy for people who haven't had the functionality before to say "oh i don't need that". You may not need it often, but when you do it's a real pain to not have it.
I see the apple apologists are out in force with the "steve wants it to be perfect" argument. Considering cut and paste has been a staple feature of modern gui operating systems for 25 years or more, you'd THINK they had it down by now.
farkin trolls, i hope the go to jail for fraud.
my wife got one of these on her laptop the other day. endless popup windows disguised to look like windows system messages or anti-virus software. she knows we use avast and thought the windows looked 'different' so she asked me to take a look. Kill firefox and problem solved.
I guess my point is, it didn't take a whole lot of knowledge for her to identify a scam. Know what is SUPPOSED to be running on your system and what those things look like. If you see anything different, get suspicious.
It's funny how the people I know that spread the most FUD about viruses/phishing/scams (panicky emails about the latest e-boogey man) are also the ones that get hit most often. You'd think they'd be the most paranoid and stay safe.
How about you just learn to drive and shut your whore mouth until you have thought things through? Its idiots like you trying to make laws that causes the kind of epic fail in IP we are experiencing.
awwwww looks like someone's got a case of the Mondays!
recently, the premier episode of HowStuffWorks on Discovery channel was about corn. When talking about the amount of land cultivated for corm production, the expert mentioned that it was equivalent to 2000 Vatican Cities.
When did Vatican City become a unit of measurement? For that matter, since most people haven't been there and have NO idea of the size, WHY IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WOULD YOU USE IT???
Seriously - how many areas are just the same area over and over again with different graphics? The towns and mountains and such are in different places, but by level 10 you've pretty much seen all the gameplay there is to see.
I guess you have never tried a Nokia E61 or, for that matter, the many Windows Smartphones where even if youy don't like mobile IE, there is always Opera.
I have been through numerous winMo smart phones. I went through a new "smart phone" about every 6-8 months over a period of about 5 years. I have yet to find one with the ease of use and overall utility of my gen 1 iPhone. The only one that came close was my blackberry curve, another device that just works. Opera mobile is a total piece of junk in my opinion. I tried it on a winMo and blackberry and was not impressed.
no i don't like the apple lock in, i also don't like the battery replacement issues, but in the end, i get more use and more enjoyment out of this phone than any other I have owned and it's worth the trade off.
For my part, I stick with Steam. Unlimited downloads. Hell, even if they charged me a buck to cover bandwidth and storage I wouldn't feel bad for a 50 dollar game. I've never had an issue with Steam and as long as they keep up their track record I'm going to keep with it. I've even passed up on several games because I couldn't get a Steam copy.
I second that! I've had a few quirks with Steam losing my password and their god awful password reset setup, but overall, I've been very satisfied. I like being able to reinstall a game via download. I've also had a very good experience with Direct2Drive, purchased several games from them over the last couple of years. Unlike Steam, they DO limit the number of installations allowed. However, I just contacted support when I built a new PC and they reset my installation count the next day, so no worries there i think. The only problem with this download model is game size. CoD4 was about 4GB, so you aren't gonna get instant gratification. But i just queue them up before i go to bed and I'm done in the morning...
Nothing to do with DRM. The week HD DVD died, i bought a PS3. To date, I have about 10 BR movies compared to 900 or so DVD movies.
The cost of BR movies isn't that bad if you shop around. I rarely pay more than $18 for BR. I also have netflix, yet for some reason, i don't find myself buying OR renting BR movies. I mean they look good when i watch them. mostly. and they sound good. mostly. I can't put a finger on the source of my apathy. i'm watching on a 65" DLP w/ 7.1 surround, so i don't think it's my setup at fault here.
It might be the ever increasing number of HD channels i get from Dish network. Some of them are crap, but HDNET Movies, MGM movies, UHD have some quality stuff. Is it as good as BR visually? Maybe not quite, but I find that the HD-ness of the movie matters less the more I enjoy the movie.
i thought it was awesome, until i lost my keys on a bike ride and some tool promptly spent $200 at the gas station. and i mean PROMPTLY, the transactions all happened while it was still out riding. anyway, i was put off by it at that point. the concept that possession of that little stick means verification of identity is kinda scary. i mean, i have ASK FOR ID on the back of my credit/debit cards and usually give a little "you gonna read the back" if they forget. with the speedpay/RFID model, they never see the card, i just wave it like a magic money wand. RFID has lots of great uses, but i don't really want my money tied to it...
i love all these comments suggesting ati/intel/nvidia are superior because ati/intel/nvidia has better Linux drivers/support. LOLOLOL!
like anyone cares at these companies? they support linux because the linux 'community', while small, is quite loud when they feel spurned and could have influence on purchases by non-techie friends. Dell provides a linux option because it makes them look COOL to geeks. If they sell a few more laptops, great, but they could drop it tomorrow and not notice. It's about appearances...
oh and i love these comments when coupled with "i do my gaming on windows". that being the case, why care about linux performance?
don't get me wrong, i loves me some Ubuntu. However, I just don't think it's arrived. Not in the sense that it is an important factor in hardware design for mainstream tech companies. more of an afterthought...
anyone else read this as "NASA Installing Shocks On Arse"?
sad that the thing needs such a goofy solution as shock absorbers. is there no way to build baffles or something in the engine to eliminate these vortices?
But those people claiming they run Half-Life 2 (or any source based game) through wine and it runs "the same as in Windows" kinda piss me off.
that's funny, one of the first things i did when i installed wine on my ubuntu box last year was to run HL2, since i had heard it ran pretty well. guess what? it did. in fact it ran as well as when it was running under XP on the same box. go figure. and yes, i played the hell out of it. in fact, until my rather recent discovery of WoW, HL2/EP1/EP2/Portal/Deathmatch was pretty much the only game i played consistently; so, i really had a feel for how the game SHOULD run with all settings maxed.
I DID NOT run TF2 with wine, so i can't speak to it, but it tended to perform worse under windows than HL2 on the same box. never could figure out why, but i didn't really like it anyway so i didnt try too hard.
obviously YMMV, i had worse results running WoW with wine actually. seems my box is determined to do the opposite of conventional wisdom...
I've noticed recently that ebay has become rather expensive with lots of dumb bidders bidding things up past a sane price (sane being what I can get it for at an online retailer.)
nothing new there. i've often seen people bidding MORE for a refurbished item, a 3 year old digital camera for one example, than it costs to buy it NEW. WTF? People get into a bidding mode where they MUST WIN. NOW! whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
They are loaded with advertisements
that's funny. i'm logged into my facebook account right now and after clicking through the various screens i have yet to see a single ad. that's in contrast to myspace, which likes to shove huge flash background advertisements for the latest lame movie all over the place.
the fact is this ToS was just putting in writing something they probably already did. with all the people demanding clear and transparent EULAs,ToS etc. it's ironic that when a company does the right thing, they get blasted for it.
if you're putting your information, content, whatever on a FREE website, you are agreeing to surrender some privacy. Don't like it? DON'T AGREE TO THE ToS and use these sites. All the people that made this such a shit-storm are free to move to some other social site that doesn't do the exact same thing. wait. there isn't one.
oh great now I have to change the combination on my luggage!
just like columbia, i slept through the whole thing. need to come up with a business plan for notifying people in the event of space debris showers...
i read the headline as "Iowa Seeks To Remove Electrical Charge"
so i get up this morning and start googling. whaaaaat? even cnn is malware today. thank god i decided to hit /. to see if anyone else was getting this, i figured if it was google wide, someone here would post it. saved me lots of scanning and wondering wtf is wrong with my pc.
yes, you can turn it off, which makes it even more useless. it's a useful feature on most phones, but as implemented by apple it's obtrusive. it's like apple deliberately went in the opposite direction just to prove they "think different". no other phone I'VE had handles predictive this way and that includes smart phones from nokia, moto, blackberry, samsung and htc. i've been through a pile of them and in most other respects, for me, the iphone beats them hands down.
does it have hogger? didn't think so.
you know this is what bugs me about apple. the "we know what's best" attitude. I love my iphone, but... it's the little things apple does that annoy. For example, you're composing a text message and as you enter a word, the phone comes up with what it THINKS you're spelling. no biggy, predictive text has been on cell phones for years. where apple manages to screw it up is that unless i tap the suggested word, it replaces what i'm typing, which may not be what i was spelling. On every other phone i've had, it works the other way, if i want to use the suggested word i select it. anyway, the apple method makes for a lot of retypes or excessive tapping and is one of those "leave me alone damn it" features they loooove to put in their products.
I doubt in the current financial climate people are going to be stressing green in their purchases
exactly this. green is all well and good and quite trendy when you have disposable income. Too bad a lot of the products cost so much that unless you're really just doing it for the environment there's no compelling reason to buy. The cost savings rarely outweighs the price premium. These companies are only hoping to milk the cash cow. It's too bad really because everything being 'green' would probably be a good thing.
How _do_ you copy/paste without a menu
how about if i press for say 2 seconds at the start of where i want to copy i get a draggable highlight? then i tap the highlighted text after dragging to the end point and it copies. at the other end of the process, how about i hold down for 3 seconds to paste?
seriously, for all the things my iPhone does, i'm still amazed it DOESN'T do cut and paste. Coming from a blackberry, which does cut and paste, i probably notice the lack of it more. it's easy for people who haven't had the functionality before to say "oh i don't need that". You may not need it often, but when you do it's a real pain to not have it.
I see the apple apologists are out in force with the "steve wants it to be perfect" argument. Considering cut and paste has been a staple feature of modern gui operating systems for 25 years or more, you'd THINK they had it down by now.
farkin trolls, i hope the go to jail for fraud.
my wife got one of these on her laptop the other day. endless popup windows disguised to look like windows system messages or anti-virus software. she knows we use avast and thought the windows looked 'different' so she asked me to take a look. Kill firefox and problem solved.
I guess my point is, it didn't take a whole lot of knowledge for her to identify a scam. Know what is SUPPOSED to be running on your system and what those things look like. If you see anything different, get suspicious.
It's funny how the people I know that spread the most FUD about viruses/phishing/scams (panicky emails about the latest e-boogey man) are also the ones that get hit most often. You'd think they'd be the most paranoid and stay safe.
How about you just learn to drive and shut your whore mouth until you have thought things through? Its idiots like you trying to make laws that causes the kind of epic fail in IP we are experiencing.
awwwww looks like someone's got a case of the Mondays!
deeeeeep breath. relaaaaaaaaax.
recently, the premier episode of HowStuffWorks on Discovery channel was about corn. When talking about the amount of land cultivated for corm production, the expert mentioned that it was equivalent to 2000 Vatican Cities.
When did Vatican City become a unit of measurement? For that matter, since most people haven't been there and have NO idea of the size, WHY IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY WOULD YOU USE IT???
durrrr...............
Seriously - how many areas are just the same area over and over again with different graphics? The towns and mountains and such are in different places, but by level 10 you've pretty much seen all the gameplay there is to see.
Sounds suspiciously like Earth...
I guess you have never tried a Nokia E61 or, for that matter, the many Windows Smartphones where even if youy don't like mobile IE, there is always Opera.
I have been through numerous winMo smart phones. I went through a new "smart phone" about every 6-8 months over a period of about 5 years. I have yet to find one with the ease of use and overall utility of my gen 1 iPhone. The only one that came close was my blackberry curve, another device that just works. Opera mobile is a total piece of junk in my opinion. I tried it on a winMo and blackberry and was not impressed.
no i don't like the apple lock in, i also don't like the battery replacement issues, but in the end, i get more use and more enjoyment out of this phone than any other I have owned and it's worth the trade off.
For my part, I stick with Steam. Unlimited downloads. Hell, even if they charged me a buck to cover bandwidth and storage I wouldn't feel bad for a 50 dollar game. I've never had an issue with Steam and as long as they keep up their track record I'm going to keep with it. I've even passed up on several games because I couldn't get a Steam copy.
I second that! I've had a few quirks with Steam losing my password and their god awful password reset setup, but overall, I've been very satisfied. I like being able to reinstall a game via download. I've also had a very good experience with Direct2Drive, purchased several games from them over the last couple of years. Unlike Steam, they DO limit the number of installations allowed. However, I just contacted support when I built a new PC and they reset my installation count the next day, so no worries there i think. The only problem with this download model is game size. CoD4 was about 4GB, so you aren't gonna get instant gratification. But i just queue them up before i go to bed and I'm done in the morning...
Nothing to do with DRM. The week HD DVD died, i bought a PS3. To date, I have about 10 BR movies compared to 900 or so DVD movies. The cost of BR movies isn't that bad if you shop around. I rarely pay more than $18 for BR. I also have netflix, yet for some reason, i don't find myself buying OR renting BR movies. I mean they look good when i watch them. mostly. and they sound good. mostly. I can't put a finger on the source of my apathy. i'm watching on a 65" DLP w/ 7.1 surround, so i don't think it's my setup at fault here.
It might be the ever increasing number of HD channels i get from Dish network. Some of them are crap, but HDNET Movies, MGM movies, UHD have some quality stuff. Is it as good as BR visually? Maybe not quite, but I find that the HD-ness of the movie matters less the more I enjoy the movie.
to add insult to injury, i never play ps3 games.
i thought it was awesome, until i lost my keys on a bike ride and some tool promptly spent $200 at the gas station. and i mean PROMPTLY, the transactions all happened while it was still out riding. anyway, i was put off by it at that point. the concept that possession of that little stick means verification of identity is kinda scary. i mean, i have ASK FOR ID on the back of my credit/debit cards and usually give a little "you gonna read the back" if they forget. with the speedpay/RFID model, they never see the card, i just wave it like a magic money wand. RFID has lots of great uses, but i don't really want my money tied to it...
i love all these comments suggesting ati/intel/nvidia are superior because ati/intel/nvidia has better Linux drivers/support. LOLOLOL! like anyone cares at these companies? they support linux because the linux 'community', while small, is quite loud when they feel spurned and could have influence on purchases by non-techie friends. Dell provides a linux option because it makes them look COOL to geeks. If they sell a few more laptops, great, but they could drop it tomorrow and not notice. It's about appearances...
oh and i love these comments when coupled with "i do my gaming on windows". that being the case, why care about linux performance?
don't get me wrong, i loves me some Ubuntu. However, I just don't think it's arrived. Not in the sense that it is an important factor in hardware design for mainstream tech companies. more of an afterthought...
anyone else read this as "NASA Installing Shocks On Arse"? sad that the thing needs such a goofy solution as shock absorbers. is there no way to build baffles or something in the engine to eliminate these vortices?
looks like kevin costner will be out of a job soon. why pay millions for wooden actors with exactly 1 tone of voice? almost feel sorry for the guy.
they coulda saved a lot of money if they'd just read Rocket Ship Galileo first!
But those people claiming they run Half-Life 2 (or any source based game) through wine and it runs "the same as in Windows" kinda piss me off.
that's funny, one of the first things i did when i installed wine on my ubuntu box last year was to run HL2, since i had heard it ran pretty well. guess what? it did. in fact it ran as well as when it was running under XP on the same box. go figure. and yes, i played the hell out of it. in fact, until my rather recent discovery of WoW, HL2/EP1/EP2/Portal/Deathmatch was pretty much the only game i played consistently; so, i really had a feel for how the game SHOULD run with all settings maxed.
I DID NOT run TF2 with wine, so i can't speak to it, but it tended to perform worse under windows than HL2 on the same box. never could figure out why, but i didn't really like it anyway so i didnt try too hard.
obviously YMMV, i had worse results running WoW with wine actually. seems my box is determined to do the opposite of conventional wisdom...
will it blend?
I've noticed recently that ebay has become rather expensive with lots of dumb bidders bidding things up past a sane price (sane being what I can get it for at an online retailer.)
nothing new there. i've often seen people bidding MORE for a refurbished item, a 3 year old digital camera for one example, than it costs to buy it NEW. WTF? People get into a bidding mode where they MUST WIN. NOW! whatever.