Don't do anything on a work machine you wouldn't do if it was being shown on a 50" TV above your head.
They actually have a white list of sites that they 'trust' and do not do MITM - banks mainly, but a search on Google defaulting to HTTPS is not secure.
I have used www.priceusa.com.au to purchase quite a range of items. Clothing, Amazon items, electronics. Never had any issues. They are always fast to respond to inquires. They order the goods, which are delivered to an address in the USA, then shipped to you.
A lot of friends use ComGateway to purchase items from Amazon and a few other places.
Speaking to friends who work and live in China it really isn't that hard to get around the GFW. China are using it to keep the masses controlled and limit their access, but at the same time, leaving it easy enough to get around that the "elite" are still able to use the Internet to its full potential. Making it possible for large companies to compete globally.
"Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy"
There is a very big leap between removing DRM and giving it away free. When there was no Amazon Music Store, and no iTunes Plus there was piracy. Since the introduction of iTune Plus and Amazon's DRM MP3 store there has been piracy.
Since Radiohead sold their album as MP3s online for "whatever you want to pay" they have continued to sell CDs (Infact, In Rainbows has done very well in the US charts as a CD album).
DRM does nothing to halt piracy, the thought that it has any affect at all on piracy is quite ridiculous.
The bigger worry for the music industry is the quality of music being produced. If they continue to try and market music that no one wants, they are not going to sell it. DRM, no DRM, if people don't want to listen to the music, they wont buy it.
I can't understand all these readers without a backlight. Yes yes, the battery lasts longer, eInk is different. But what I really like about reading books on my PDA is the backlight. It means I can read without a lamp on at night, and don't have to contort my self into strange positions to get a light on th page.
Hydrogen fuel cells seem like a great solution to polluting cars, and longer 'batter' life on gadgets. But what it really is, is just a way on carrying power (electricity) in the form of hydrogen from one place to another. You take the power from your home, to your car, and then use it as you drive around. But creating that hydrogen takes a lot of power. With most of the worlds power coming for very unclean sources, mainly coal fire power stations, while hydrogen fuel cells don't have any emissions at the car, the power used to break the water into hydrogen and oxygen can create a huge amount of pollution. Of course the exception to this comes from places where the massive amounts of electricity required to break water into hydrogen and oxygen can come from clean sources. Scandinavia, I'm looking at you.
> "Clone Products" being presumably things like Mono and OpenOffice (as they duplicate Microsoft APIs and products)
I would hardly call OpenOffice a clone product. Ignoring all the jokes about it not being the same, because it doesn't crash or whatever, if it is a clone of a MS product, what is Word? It wasn't the first Word Processor.
I work for an IT department for a very large organisation. The worst thing about having all these patches released on the one day is that everything else grinds to a halt while we go through the patches and prepare them for release. Even if we have deadlines on the Thursday (Tuesday is Wednesday here), everything else stops for the patches.
It would make everyone's life here a lot easier if there were a couple of patches a week and we could spread that workload out and continue with other work.
Can someone make a note of this to compare with what Steve announces at Mac World in January? I am betting he will have a different spin on the same figures.
I was also there. This is nothing new. It uses LCD glasses that shut off each eye in turn, and the screen (in this case it was a projector) displays what the left eye sees, then the right eye.... you get the idea. It kind of looks 3D, and adds a convincing motion blur that makes it look like the TV is vibrating, but I got a head ache because I can see the flicker. Worse than looking at an old CRT with a refresh rate of 60hz.
I remember seeing this same thing about 10 years ago at a 'Big Boy's Toys Expo' (at the same location in Melbourne). Then they were demoing the 'latest Tomb Raider', now they are demoing Doom3. Strangely, this is one technology that seems to have gotten more expensive over time. I remembered I could have bought the system for well under $100AU (then).
You said "I don't want to vote Republican or Democrat, only to find out later I totally disagree with something a candidate stands for."
Which is fair enough. But if you don't vote, and later on you find out that you totally disagree with the candidate who won don't go crying to anyone that you don't like them and what they stand for. What did you do in an effort to keep them out?
- I live in a country where you are required to turn up to a polling station for an ellection. The law doesn't say anything about actaully voting.
Nintendo have put motion sensing and rumble into the Wii controller. They didn't seem to have any of the same issues as Sony did combining the two. Considering the cost of a Wii and a PS3, I hardly think cost was an issue.
Sony took it out because they were sued by Immersion Corporation and didn't want to license it from them.
So Apple has finaly caught upto the free open source http://www.rockbox.org/ firmware with gapless play back. Excpet it needs to re-jig the files to make them gapless. Rockbox doesn't.
They added a search function much like the one that has existed in Creative (and others) players for a while.
The battery life on video play back has caught up with other players, although it does still lag behind quite a few.
If I remember correctly, the last keynote Job's took advertised the iPod as having 80~% market share. Now 75~%.
The question implies that DRM stops people releasing unprotected tracks to the Internet for illegal download. But it doesn't. It is a trivial matter to bypass any DRM and extract the content. No ammount of DRM has even slowed illegal downloads, if anything it has added to it. People would rather have a non-DRM copy.
If you want to know about an economy without DRM talk to emusic, or Audio Lunch Box. It might not be all the music you are interested in personally, but they have a business model based on non-DRM music downloads.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't do anything on a work machine you wouldn't do if it was being shown on a 50" TV above your head. They actually have a white list of sites that they 'trust' and do not do MITM - banks mainly, but a search on Google defaulting to HTTPS is not secure.
I have used www.priceusa.com.au to purchase quite a range of items. Clothing, Amazon items, electronics. Never had any issues. They are always fast to respond to inquires. They order the goods, which are delivered to an address in the USA, then shipped to you. A lot of friends use ComGateway to purchase items from Amazon and a few other places.
Speaking to friends who work and live in China it really isn't that hard to get around the GFW. China are using it to keep the masses controlled and limit their access, but at the same time, leaving it easy enough to get around that the "elite" are still able to use the Internet to its full potential. Making it possible for large companies to compete globally.
Time to make sure my PGP certificate is still working ....
"Giving up control of content and giving it away free are not rational ideas in a market economy"
There is a very big leap between removing DRM and giving it away free. When there was no Amazon Music Store, and no iTunes Plus there was piracy. Since the introduction of iTune Plus and Amazon's DRM MP3 store there has been piracy.
Since Radiohead sold their album as MP3s online for "whatever you want to pay" they have continued to sell CDs (Infact, In Rainbows has done very well in the US charts as a CD album).
DRM does nothing to halt piracy, the thought that it has any affect at all on piracy is quite ridiculous.
The bigger worry for the music industry is the quality of music being produced. If they continue to try and market music that no one wants, they are not going to sell it. DRM, no DRM, if people don't want to listen to the music, they wont buy it.
I am glad they have as much faith in Vista as the rest of us have.
My Palm PDA with eReader.
I can't understand all these readers without a backlight. Yes yes, the battery lasts longer, eInk is different. But what I really like about reading books on my PDA is the backlight. It means I can read without a lamp on at night, and don't have to contort my self into strange positions to get a light on th page.
Hydrogen fuel cells seem like a great solution to polluting cars, and longer 'batter' life on gadgets. But what it really is, is just a way on carrying power (electricity) in the form of hydrogen from one place to another. You take the power from your home, to your car, and then use it as you drive around. But creating that hydrogen takes a lot of power.
With most of the worlds power coming for very unclean sources, mainly coal fire power stations, while hydrogen fuel cells don't have any emissions at the car, the power used to break the water into hydrogen and oxygen can create a huge amount of pollution.
Of course the exception to this comes from places where the massive amounts of electricity required to break water into hydrogen and oxygen can come from clean sources. Scandinavia, I'm looking at you.
I use Amarok + libmtp with my MP3 player and it works great for syncing.
> "Clone Products" being presumably things like Mono and OpenOffice (as they duplicate Microsoft APIs and products) I would hardly call OpenOffice a clone product. Ignoring all the jokes about it not being the same, because it doesn't crash or whatever, if it is a clone of a MS product, what is Word? It wasn't the first Word Processor.
> Sure, sometimes you need to apply an out-of-cycle patch.. these are rare but Microsoft seems to understand that they are needed.
Such as the patch to fix a hole in their DRM that was exploited by FairUse4WM.
This was clearly an emergency, and needed to be patched out of cycle.
I work for an IT department for a very large organisation. The worst thing about having all these patches released on the one day is that everything else grinds to a halt while we go through the patches and prepare them for release. Even if we have deadlines on the Thursday (Tuesday is Wednesday here), everything else stops for the patches.
It would make everyone's life here a lot easier if there were a couple of patches a week and we could spread that workload out and continue with other work.
The genius part was proving their was a threat, then inventing the solution to that threat.
Fantastic business model.
Can someone make a note of this to compare with what Steve announces at Mac World in January? I am betting he will have a different spin on the same figures.
I am even more shocked to hear they are limiting themselves to just 2 sequels.
I was also there. This is nothing new. It uses LCD glasses that shut off each eye in turn, and the screen (in this case it was a projector) displays what the left eye sees, then the right eye .... you get the idea. It kind of looks 3D, and adds a convincing motion blur that makes it look like the TV is vibrating, but I got a head ache because I can see the flicker. Worse than looking at an old CRT with a refresh rate of 60hz.
I remember seeing this same thing about 10 years ago at a 'Big Boy's Toys Expo' (at the same location in Melbourne). Then they were demoing the 'latest Tomb Raider', now they are demoing Doom3. Strangely, this is one technology that seems to have gotten more expensive over time. I remembered I could have bought the system for well under $100AU (then).
You said "I don't want to vote Republican or Democrat, only to find out later I totally disagree with something a candidate stands for."
Which is fair enough. But if you don't vote, and later on you find out that you totally disagree with the candidate who won don't go crying to anyone that you don't like them and what they stand for. What did you do in an effort to keep them out?
-
I live in a country where you are required to turn up to a polling station for an ellection. The law doesn't say anything about actaully voting.
Nintendo have put motion sensing and rumble into the Wii controller. They didn't seem to have any of the same issues as Sony did combining the two. Considering the cost of a Wii and a PS3, I hardly think cost was an issue. Sony took it out because they were sued by Immersion Corporation and didn't want to license it from them.
So Apple has finaly caught upto the free open source http://www.rockbox.org/ firmware with gapless play back. Excpet it needs to re-jig the files to make them gapless. Rockbox doesn't.
They added a search function much like the one that has existed in Creative (and others) players for a while.
The battery life on video play back has caught up with other players, although it does still lag behind quite a few.
If I remember correctly, the last keynote Job's took advertised the iPod as having 80~% market share. Now 75~%.
The question implies that DRM stops people releasing unprotected tracks to the Internet for illegal download. But it doesn't. It is a trivial matter to bypass any DRM and extract the content. No ammount of DRM has even slowed illegal downloads, if anything it has added to it. People would rather have a non-DRM copy. If you want to know about an economy without DRM talk to emusic, or Audio Lunch Box. It might not be all the music you are interested in personally, but they have a business model based on non-DRM music downloads.