blocked e-cards - you mean none of that bloody annoying annimation and audio! Where do I sign up???? Seriously I'd be quite happy if all the e-card companies went titsup tomorrow.
By the same token - meh I don't care if each application has its own menu bar - makes me have to move the mouse less if I have to do something in an app that doesn't have focus yet.
Besides there are plenty of ways to save even more space. The real waste of space isn't the menubar - its the window decorations. I keep windows around on my desktop for games but I use Zen on my laptop with Fluxbox - I like having everything at the click of a mouse and if you turn off window decorations and bind some keys to close minimize and maximize then you typically save as much space as eliminating the menubar and at the same time the fluxbox bar is a lot smaller than the os x dock. Theres no icons on your desktop by default in fluxbox (you can add them with rox or adesklets) so theres that much less clutter and combine all this with the goodness of sloppy focus and you barely move your mouse. Very elegant.
What I will give Windows is how quick it is to pick up - from what I've seen atleast - YMMV. The amount of free screen space in the end probably depends more on the user. I've a very sparse Windows desktop and I've seen Mac users cover their desktops in icons and make sure their dock is filled with every application even if they don't use most of them.
So Yahoo seems to be advertising its own search service more than anything else. Huh...who'd have though a search company advertising their own search service - the horror. They are hardly pushing it - that'd be forcing you to download IE7 with the yahoo toolbar bundled and blocking dedicated FF+typically Google users like me.
Pretty soon, several games will be Vista only - Halo 2 comes to mind. I'd say by 2008 most stuios will start being Vista only or XP but with reduced settings. This is ok - serious gamers tend to upgrade hardware much more frequently than the average Joe user - every 1.5 years I thinkis about right. New games are pretty high priced so pretty much only serious gamers are buying them anyways - the average Joes wait a while until the price goes down. My only concern is that Vista is supposed to divert all system resources towards games when in play - wether it will actually work before a few dozen patches is a concern - and Vista consumes a crap load of resources even to run in the background - how much of a dent will that be on performance?
Bollocks. The PS3 is not a critical or essential item (irrespective of what you might feel) and theres nothing illegal about scalping it. Its bloody unfair for most people but unfair is not the same as illegal.
Sure its going to make the PS3 a whole lot harder to get for christmas but if you wanted one that bad there was nothing to stop you from waiting in line for a week.
The homeless people and chinese nationals made a bit from it for essentially standing in line - how is that a bad thing?
This is simply the free market working and pretty much nothing could have prevented it.
So I did RTFA and its a bloody troll. It starts of insulting M$, dismisses it as an unbashed copy of the iPod (despite the fact that the headline is iPod is not), dismisses PlaysForSure which bombed yet says there is an issue for all those poor people who bought music from PFS and whines about how the poor user will have to learn yet another complicated piece of software just to put music on the Zune. Then he gets to the review.
Its an excellent player he says - oh except for the colors (black and white just like the iPod but lets please complain about brown and it being rubberized so you wont leave your oily prints over it like the ipod). Oh and its not cool. Because every Tom, Dick and fucking Harry with their white headphones are. And damn those ipod ads are sexy... Matches the ipod on battery life, price point, capacity, got a bigger screen (lets make nothing of this and whine that it is larger and awww poor baby its a whole ounce heavier - too much for you delicate darlings ofcourse)
Oh and it doesn't have a scroll wheel... and people complain about Windows users being used to the interface and not being able to deal with a switch. Or dearie me its got a larger screen and so you have to turn it a whole ninety degrees to watch a video - yes ladies and gentleman a whole Pi/2 radians. The horror. Its got in built FM Radio (but you have to plug in the headphones - wait every frickin player with an FM radio requires this - duh you don't want to stick an ugly dedicated antenna on it)
Yes the thing has its flaws and the big one is not being able to use it as a harddisk (tops a couple of months before MS or someone writes a little bit of code to enable that) and the stupid wireless limitations (the ipods wirless limitation is simple - it doesnt have it - but our dear wonderful apple could certainly add that to the ipod) and the Zune store presently sucks donkey balls (please tell me that all the music on your ipod is from iTMS... and that they will never add features to a website).
No lets whine about the lack of an alarm, and a world clock, and a stop watch... things that a quick and given that its MS, eventual firmware upgrade, will fix (or rockbox will have a nice zune port) and wait ofcourse MS has already said there are new zune features and accesories in the pipeline. Just RTFA for the language and tone and compare it with anything modded troll or flamebait here. Heck the GNAA could take a leaf out of Pogue's book.
Not one mention about anyones complaints about iPods (and please use google all you witty mac fanboys who will claim there arent none)
The Zune is certainly not the iPod. Neither are perfect. Software is upgradeable. David Pogue is a troll. Plain. Simple.
(disclaimer : I hate MS, I hate apple, I own a cowon and I wont buy a zune)
cheaper cds with better music and no DRM and rootkits? I should stop dreaming shouldn't I...
Thinking about it most of the cds i bought the last few years have been from small bands after a live gig. The one I liked best had a booklet with the lyrics to all the songs and a couple of free stickers and was still ten bucks.
So no CDs arent dead because I can't see myself going to a live gig and connecting over WiFi to some server and downloading their album.
Actually I think record labels would like cds to die. The no physical media of digital files is so much cheaper - the DRM is more capable format control than just a physical cd. Yes ofcourse I'm going to rip the cd and put it on my cowon and I'm not going to pay again for a DRM encumbered download (atleast DRM I can't strip and not be burning to disc and re ripping) and I doubt record companies like that. Putting on my tin foil hat I can imagine music that gets sold as pay per play or expires after a certain number of plays or degrades artifically digitally, after a certain period of time. Record companies can make more money with any of the above and so it will likely happen sooner or later. So they would much rather have the cd market die since they have much more control over all those kids buying their tracks from the iTunes store. A little yelling and they can get apple to change their DRM after all.
It wouldn't surprise me if downloading has actually gone down. The **AA in this country and and its sister agencies internationally have been somewhat successful in shutting down the big p2p networks. There seem like there are more p2p nets out there than "back in the day" but they are less well known, and so Joe Blogg isn't able to download as easily anymore, and is probably worried about all the lawsuits. Ofcourse recording industry sales have also gone down so maybe both sales and downloading are down because people are not downloading crappy new releases:-P
Clearly, this entire comment page is a failure to understand the Indian mindset.
Really what happened is the company (Airtel) didn't bribe some politician or offended one in some manner (such as an employee of the company playing his music too loud next door, or the company CEO refusing to let the politicians layabout son marry his daughter or some such, or indeed because the politicians astrologer told him it would be beneficial if he put shani in the 4th house of Airtel...).
Clearly Airtel is in the deepest shit because
"While the assessment on Airtel was completed and a notice issued to it for alleged tax evasion during the year 2005-06, no assessment has been concluded on other OFC broadband providers," A.K. Chitaguppi, Deputy Commissioner of Commercial Taxes, said.
Ahh the Chitaguppis of this world are getting upitty these days.
The problem will go away when either Airtel does bribe said politico or this goes to court for ten years and lawyers bicker back and forth using words that do not mean what they think they mean, and it dies a nice peaceful death. Or the politician does.
In the event that this is the tax department trying to be "creative", I'd points out that cellular providers, radio providers and indeed basically any device that has a counter (your speedometer for instance)that you look at uses photons to transmit data to your cellphone/radio/eye. Ofcourse just imagine the increase in revenue if they taxed all those devices. Or argue that light is energy and Airtel (might be) is paying for their energy and simply changing energy from one form to another is a perfectly dull thing to do and is all allowed by this lovely little principle called conservation of energy.
Also for your general light entertainment (hyuk hyuk) have a song.
Enough posters have pointed out that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prevents countries from claiming things in space as part of their country.
SHOULD any country be allowed to claim things in space as part of their country?? Plenty of people have said the treaty will be scrapped when we start to see more colonies and space statations. Should these by aligned with a country at all? What if a private company developed the entire colony/space station - do they claim it and get to enforce their own laws on it?
My opinions were probably shaped most by the quantities of science fiction I read/watched as a kid but I don't think the concept of a country has any meaning in space and, although I see no practical alternative to countries on this planet, I'd argue that nations are a bad concept on this planet too. I don't trust countries to work together for all of our benefit. Nations are meant to serve the interests of one group of people over another. The groups of people are typically delimited by geographic boundaries and sometimes these are no more substantial than a line on a map. For the same reason, call me a socialist or a commie, I certainly don't think companies should control anything in space. Its entirely senseless to drag these divisions further into space.
You can dismiss me as a mad leftie who wants some form of global conciousness (which I admit is a very long way away) but would you like a repeat of the US vs China vs India vs Pakistan vs Russia vs Georgia.... over the moon say? We are already seeing one sphere in which geographic divisions are becoming more irrelevant in the internet (ofcourse I'd have a hard time telling this to Chinese bloggers today). On a day when N. Korea joins the list of nations to test nuclear weapons, do we need any more warning that developing technology before we develop a global conciousness is incredibly dangerous ad short-sighted.
Dear god yes Rockbox takes care of a shit load of problems - one your mp3s can be sorted by Folder no problem at all. Rockbox has a built in Tag cache system that can read your mp3s tags - you choose if you want to navigate your music by File view or Tag View. Atleast using Rockbox for a cowon player if you hold down menu instead of a short press you get to a screen that will allow you to turn shuffle on and off as well as change the display (the ID3 based view or a folder view between all files, supported, music)
Now rockbox is far from perfect - no reasonable video and nothing from iTMS with Apple's DRM will work (though if you are using a creative player this ought not to be an issue) though you can dual boot the firmwares. You can put in album art through a custom WPS though its not nearly as smooth as the iTunes way. Also if you liked the iPod for its simple menu structure then you are probably looking in the wrong place.
Raptor: Call of the Shadows Gods Legacy of Kain : Anything but Blood Omen 2 Jedi Outcast Wing Commander/Privateer anything but particularly WC Prophecy and P2
Leaving out Commander Keen and Barbarian but Gods was just so much more incredible.
These would definetly be the comfort games as opposed to favourite games - the games I load up over a weekend for a quick romp after a hard period. The favourite list is similar but includes Masters of Orion, Half Life anything, CoD 1/2, Diablo, Thief, Duke...
When did fanboi blog pieces become post worthy articles? Given the clear bias of that article I feel the need to respond and expound on why the iPod WILL DIE and lose a few karma points in the process. I also intend to be biased and obnoxious in response to said article.
1) They are just not cool Apple is quickly losing its coolness factor with both the iPod and the Mac. Apple's control over the way its products look actually works against it as its products become more popular - I walked into a cafe last semester and saw a lovely row of people, all yuppies btw, using shiny white macbooks and it looked pretty damn ridiculous. Play count the white headphones once and then ask yourself if you want to buy a regulation white iPod. Yes its a landmark for miniturization that apple can make the shuffle so small that it can fit up your arse hole but making things small isn't the same as making things cool and it certainly isn't making them usable. (Reall fanboi's point 4) belongs here - he tries to make it a seperate idea but really its just one disjointed rant)
2) Its known... to be defective Survey this page for the number of comments about defective batteries - sure you can get them replaced - or even buy a player in which they don't faint in the first place.
3) Price for features the ipod looks competetive on price until you compare a feature list. Fanboi argues that people don't care about functionality and only simple looks and shiny colors. I don't. Give me an FM tuner and a voice recorder please - wihtout me paying 40 bucks for it. Zune will have Wifi and it won't be long before someone figures out how to connect it to the web.
4) see 1)
5) You go girl - accesorize that mutha! Mmm iSkins for your iPod and headphones with glowing wires! Wee! Wear you glowing wire headphones - I think you look fucking ridiculous just like the idiots with those glowing rims for his car. Yes, please enjoy that fancy dock - I'm sniggering at you paying more than 100 bucks for a pair of crappy sounding speakers and a plasticky remote. That you don't use because you listen to your music from your shiny white macbook at home. With widgets!
6)The dinosaurs didn't like to change either Fanboi claims that you will never change from an iPod if it was your first player and IF it worked well for you. So now that we've lost all those people who've had to change their battery or can't read the nano's screen anymore or found that click wheel unresponsive one morning, and all those people who are so sick of seeing everyone with whiteheadphones(TM) and all those poor cash strapped students who will happily save fifty bucks for noname player how many does that leave. Yours was alwaysa lonely world fanboi...
7) oooh fancy bigger hard drives! and a color screen! Everyone has been introducing bigger drives - really fanboi actaully read release information before blogging. There really is a size limit for things beyond which there is not much point in making them smaller. I can wire up a really tiny calculator but its useless if you can't press its buttons. Unless your in Gitmo and Apple makes that iPhone you've not much need of something that can be lodged up your nether regions. And if Apple makes that iphone or that touch/widescreen ipod I will laugh as you get suckered into an even more rapid charge discharge cycle for that Li ion battery.
8)If you think MS is bad... Apple is rapidly becoming a company that drops buzzwords and gives you useless users iCandy. Yes cocoa, yes shiny metal Aqua, yes expose - so pretty and so utterly pointless. Yes you love that little widget that tells you what the weather is now, so that you can look at it and be entirely confident that its 58 and its raining, and you no longer have to look out that little window (yes the real world thing that goes in a wall and occasionally has curtains) OOOOH a calculator widget - too bad you still haven't figured out order of operations from primary school and still can't add and divide. You brag about iLife but al
Nonsense. This is just a feature - buy a PS3 - it will play your Blu Ray movies, surf the web, play your music, study protein folding, and now warm your house too! Forget paying your heating bill - its the perfect Christmas present! Rumour has it that it can even play games.
A great present to send to any of your loved ones in the army serving abroad - hours of entertainment and when in a spot of bother the troops can combine 5 or more PS3s and a few Sony batterys to create a high power IED!
This is content provider paying for normal quality service from the customer's ISP not his own. They already paid their ISP for their high bandwidth bill. Also, they wouldn't be paying for higher quality service - they'd be paying for the not having their QoS artifically degraded.
Try to make an analogy between an internet transcation and a plane flight is pretty idiotic. You don't pay every ISP between your computer and some website for every packet you send. You certainly pay every carrier that you choose to go from A to B and you can certainly pay for the privlege of first class throughout but you also had control over where you were going and which airlines you were using. The neo-communist reference is just flamebait. You are a troll.
Mmmmm... CS makes for very realistic training doesn't it. We can magically appear on the map and select weapons and run and jump around real fast, even if we've gotten shot and when we die we get to fly around, la la la, and see how our teammates are doing against those mean counter terrorists. And what do you know after a few minutes we can start playing all over again despite dying in the previous round, and we even get money for losing!
I wish terrorists trained with counter strike to get good... I know a 10 year old who could kick all their asses.
No, no they aren't going to offer to install Ubuntu because then people would rarely get viruses and worms and the anti virus people again go out of buisness. Fighting viruses was really trying to fix the problem without addressing the cause - a swiss cheese OS. Anything MS does to tighten up security is terrible for these guys. In some sense the only reason the market existed for thse companies is because Billy and his company produced an insecure OS. The Gates giveth and the Gates taketh away. Sucks to be CEO Symantec, though I suspect people will still be buying their useless AV software for years to come "just to be safe." As linux distros like Ubuntu, Zenwalk and Vector become friendlier and easier to install though, MS and Apple are going to be hurting in the not to distant future. After all we all like free beer.
I'm no fan of LJ but really RTFA once in a blue moon...
Both of them are completely optional. You don't have to use sponsored features, and you don't have to join sponsored communities. We think they're going to be worth it for you guys -- I personally can't wait for the SMS stuff, especially since we've had people asking for it for literally years. But if you don't want to see it, you don't have to.
We want to give you guys options. One of those options is more features; one of them is the choice of seeing whether or not you want to listen to what companies have to say and offer about their products. But it's your choice -- you can also choose to completely ignore it if you want.
The only time you see sponsorship information if you are a paid user is on the sponsored community/features pager - neither of which you have to use. There are always going to be problems with viral marketing - atleast here you will be able to see clearly which communities are sponsored and which are not. There will doubtless still be viral marketing with comapnies making communities that look like they are grassroots stuff but just like lonelygirl the lesson is learn to use discretion. Or don't join them at all.
Huh. We used Debian on the crappy WYSE clients they give us as first years in grad school and I always wondered why the icon was different and IMHO ugly. The new icon did not cause any confusion at all. While I used Debian on my laptop it was still Firebird and I don't think they were using different icons then.
Theres no need to overreact and rename the damn thing FartingFox or some such. Debian can name it some like Firefox for Debian and be done with it.
However, most of us will agree that this is a stupid problem to begin with.
Changing a desktop icon is trivial. Here is a happy Mozilla page giving you instruction on how to change the titlebar icon and a number of other things. http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#app_ic on Also trivial.
So, Mozilla Foundation exactly why can't Debian change your damn icons (even if I couldn't care about their reasons for doing it) when you even tell us all how to do it. Are you going to start going after users because they choose to change your icon.
My personal opinion is that both parties involved should shut up and code and provide people with a great browser and a robust distro, and more people will use both without nearly as much posturing.
All scientific statements must be falsifiable - we should be able to test them and show that they are an accurate model of nature or we must show that they fail to describe nature. In which case we don't simply give up - its back to the drawing board to find a better description/model.
Please tell me how you think theism is falsifiable - please tell me of any measurement I can make to show that your belief that the universe is governed by laws set by an omnipotent god is in any way false. Please tell me how you think theism which lacks this basic feature of any scietific statement could in some way be the ground of the scientific method.
If the way nature behaved changed (and I really do mean the structure and character of the laws changing not just varying something like the fine structure constant or finding a new process in some privously unexplored regime) then it would have measurable consequences - astronomers and astrophysicists look into the past on a daily basis and if we find some system that does not obey the same laws you'd better believe that we'd pounce on it and do everything we could to explain it scientifically. Until we find such evidence the scientific method supports the simpler theory that the laws don't change over time and from place to place.
Ofcourse you could argue that the laws always change in such a way to hide the fact that things were different at some point but that clearly is not a scientific theory since its not falsifiable.
So yes until I find convincing evidence that the laws are changing I will support the view that they are not. I don't feel the need to pray to god(s) tonight so the omnipotent one(s) keeps my microwave working tommorrow.
So for those that have been ussing Vista, Can you strip out all this silly extra garbage and make Vista look and act like 2K? Can I make all the gadgets/widgets/whatever they are called quickly disapear and not waste CPU cycles?
Yes you can choose not to use any of the gadgets or silly extra garbage but I'd actually want to go further - can I completely UNINSTALL the gadgets and whatever allows Flip3d and can I completely UNINSTALL WMP/IE/Windows Mail/Photo Gallery/Calendar/Media Center/DVD and movie maker/Previous Versions and delete all the additional Windows themes that I won't ever use and a half a dozen other features. Probably not when Vista initially comes out but in a year or two maybe once third parties come out with software to do just that or MS are forced to allow you to remove some program because they violate some EU anti trust ruling. Windows is still my desktop OS solely for gaming - I use linux in lab and on my laptop and I value the ability to make things minimal - the rest of this stuff is fluff that I don't need and want is is a waste of perfectly good resources.
It is not just about getting things to look sexy - its about getting things to look different. Getting things to look different cosmetically is the first step towards actually making them different.
I think the trend is to get rid of the PC as we know it and slowly replace it with devices that can only do specialized tasks - an Xbox for gaming, a Media Ceter PC that replaces your TV and audio system, a buisness PC for making that ugly slide show. Sell the same basic hardware, throw in a few specialized devices like that fancy new graphics accelerator and physics processor for the Xbox, a nifty tuner card and remote for that Media center thing and and make sure that printer and scanner only work with the BizPC. Make the software dumb "Click this button and everything will just work its so simple." Ofcourse you make the case and software look different so that Joe Schmoe could never even dream that his Xbox could run his little spreadsheet app no problem.
Sell all three to Joe, charge obscene license fees for the software - maybe pull a TiVo to ensure only your own software works with your hardware. While you are at it charge an extra 500 bucks because the Xbox case was designed by Armani and looks sexy.
This is great for buisness but it should scare most of you since/.ers do more with their computers than Joe Schmoe.
Slashdot Mirror
blocked e-cards - you mean none of that bloody annoying annimation and audio! Where do I sign up???? Seriously I'd be quite happy if all the e-card companies went titsup tomorrow.
By the same token - meh I don't care if each application has its own menu bar - makes me have to move the mouse less if I have to do something in an app that doesn't have focus yet.
Besides there are plenty of ways to save even more space. The real waste of space isn't the menubar - its the window decorations. I keep windows around on my desktop for games but I use Zen on my laptop with Fluxbox - I like having everything at the click of a mouse and if you turn off window decorations and bind some keys to close minimize and maximize then you typically save as much space as eliminating the menubar and at the same time the fluxbox bar is a lot smaller than the os x dock. Theres no icons on your desktop by default in fluxbox (you can add them with rox or adesklets) so theres that much less clutter and combine all this with the goodness of sloppy focus and you barely move your mouse. Very elegant.
What I will give Windows is how quick it is to pick up - from what I've seen atleast - YMMV. The amount of free screen space in the end probably depends more on the user. I've a very sparse Windows desktop and I've seen Mac users cover their desktops in icons and make sure their dock is filled with every application even if they don't use most of them.
so I just went to search.yahoo.com after eons and what do I see on the top of the page
"Use Yahoo! to search from Firefox
Just select "Yahoo!" from the search box drop-down menu in your browser"
screenshot
So Yahoo seems to be advertising its own search service more than anything else. Huh...who'd have though a search company advertising their own search service - the horror. They are hardly pushing it - that'd be forcing you to download IE7 with the yahoo toolbar bundled and blocking dedicated FF+typically Google users like me.
Utter bs. Must be a slow news day.
You must be new here. This is slashdot - no one actually RTFA and frequently no one reads the comments.
Pretty soon, several games will be Vista only - Halo 2 comes to mind. I'd say by 2008 most stuios will start being Vista only or XP but with reduced settings. This is ok - serious gamers tend to upgrade hardware much more frequently than the average Joe user - every 1.5 years I thinkis about right. New games are pretty high priced so pretty much only serious gamers are buying them anyways - the average Joes wait a while until the price goes down. My only concern is that Vista is supposed to divert all system resources towards games when in play - wether it will actually work before a few dozen patches is a concern - and Vista consumes a crap load of resources even to run in the background - how much of a dent will that be on performance?
Bollocks. The PS3 is not a critical or essential item (irrespective of what you might feel) and theres nothing illegal about scalping it. Its bloody unfair for most people but unfair is not the same as illegal.
Sure its going to make the PS3 a whole lot harder to get for christmas but if you wanted one that bad there was nothing to stop you from waiting in line for a week.
The homeless people and chinese nationals made a bit from it for essentially standing in line - how is that a bad thing?
This is simply the free market working and pretty much nothing could have prevented it.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
So I did RTFA and its a bloody troll. It starts of insulting M$, dismisses it as an unbashed copy of the iPod (despite the fact that the headline is iPod is not), dismisses PlaysForSure which bombed yet says there is an issue for all those poor people who bought music from PFS and whines about how the poor user will have to learn yet another complicated piece of software just to put music on the Zune. Then he gets to the review.
Its an excellent player he says - oh except for the colors (black and white just like the iPod but lets please complain about brown and it being rubberized so you wont leave your oily prints over it like the ipod). Oh and its not cool. Because every Tom, Dick and fucking Harry with their white headphones are. And damn those ipod ads are sexy... Matches the ipod on battery life, price point, capacity, got a bigger screen (lets make nothing of this and whine that it is larger and awww poor baby its a whole ounce heavier - too much for you delicate darlings ofcourse)
Oh and it doesn't have a scroll wheel... and people complain about Windows users being used to the interface and not being able to deal with a switch. Or dearie me its got a larger screen and so you have to turn it a whole ninety degrees to watch a video - yes ladies and gentleman a whole Pi/2 radians. The horror. Its got in built FM Radio (but you have to plug in the headphones - wait every frickin player with an FM radio requires this - duh you don't want to stick an ugly dedicated antenna on it)
Yes the thing has its flaws and the big one is not being able to use it as a harddisk (tops a couple of months before MS or someone writes a little bit of code to enable that) and the stupid wireless limitations (the ipods wirless limitation is simple - it doesnt have it - but our dear wonderful apple could certainly add that to the ipod) and the Zune store presently sucks donkey balls (please tell me that all the music on your ipod is from iTMS... and that they will never add features to a website).
No lets whine about the lack of an alarm, and a world clock, and a stop watch... things that a quick and given that its MS, eventual firmware upgrade, will fix (or rockbox will have a nice zune port) and wait ofcourse MS has already said there are new zune features and accesories in the pipeline. Just RTFA for the language and tone and compare it with anything modded troll or flamebait here. Heck the GNAA could take a leaf out of Pogue's book.
Not one mention about anyones complaints about iPods (and please use google all you witty mac fanboys who will claim there arent none)
The Zune is certainly not the iPod. Neither are perfect. Software is upgradeable. David Pogue is a troll. Plain. Simple.
(disclaimer : I hate MS, I hate apple, I own a cowon and I wont buy a zune)
cheaper cds with better music and no DRM and rootkits? I should stop dreaming shouldn't I...
Thinking about it most of the cds i bought the last few years have been from small bands after a live gig. The one I liked best had a booklet with the lyrics to all the songs and a couple of free stickers and was still ten bucks.
So no CDs arent dead because I can't see myself going to a live gig and connecting over WiFi to some server and downloading their album.
Actually I think record labels would like cds to die. The no physical media of digital files is so much cheaper - the DRM is more capable format control than just a physical cd. Yes ofcourse I'm going to rip the cd and put it on my cowon and I'm not going to pay again for a DRM encumbered download (atleast DRM I can't strip and not be burning to disc and re ripping) and I doubt record companies like that. Putting on my tin foil hat I can imagine music that gets sold as pay per play or expires after a certain number of plays or degrades artifically digitally, after a certain period of time. Record companies can make more money with any of the above and so it will likely happen sooner or later. So they would much rather have the cd market die since they have much more control over all those kids buying their tracks from the iTunes store. A little yelling and they can get apple to change their DRM after all.
It wouldn't surprise me if downloading has actually gone down. The **AA in this country and and its sister agencies internationally have been somewhat successful in shutting down the big p2p networks. There seem like there are more p2p nets out there than "back in the day" but they are less well known, and so Joe Blogg isn't able to download as easily anymore, and is probably worried about all the lawsuits. Ofcourse recording industry sales have also gone down so maybe both sales and downloading are down because people are not downloading crappy new releases :-P
Special interest groups make up statistics that support their position... news at 11.
Really what happened is the company (Airtel) didn't bribe some politician or offended one in some manner (such as an employee of the company playing his music too loud next door, or the company CEO refusing to let the politicians layabout son marry his daughter or some such, or indeed because the politicians astrologer told him it would be beneficial if he put shani in the 4th house of Airtel...).
Clearly Airtel is in the deepest shit because Ahh the Chitaguppis of this world are getting upitty these days.
The problem will go away when either Airtel does bribe said politico or this goes to court for ten years and lawyers bicker back and forth using words that do not mean what they think they mean, and it dies a nice peaceful death. Or the politician does.
In the event that this is the tax department trying to be "creative", I'd points out that cellular providers, radio providers and indeed basically any device that has a counter (your speedometer for instance)that you look at uses photons to transmit data to your cellphone/radio/eye. Ofcourse just imagine the increase in revenue if they taxed all those devices. Or argue that light is energy and Airtel (might be) is paying for their energy and simply changing energy from one form to another is a perfectly dull thing to do and is all allowed by this lovely little principle called conservation of energy.
Also for your general light entertainment (hyuk hyuk) have a song.
Enough posters have pointed out that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prevents countries from claiming things in space as part of their country.
SHOULD any country be allowed to claim things in space as part of their country??
Plenty of people have said the treaty will be scrapped when we start to see more colonies and space statations.
Should these by aligned with a country at all? What if a private company developed the entire colony/space station - do they claim it and get to enforce their own laws on it?
My opinions were probably shaped most by the quantities of science fiction I read/watched as a kid but I don't think the concept of a country has any meaning in space and, although I see no practical alternative to countries on this planet, I'd argue that nations are a bad concept on this planet too. I don't trust countries to work together for all of our benefit. Nations are meant to serve the interests of one group of people over another. The groups of people are typically delimited by geographic boundaries and sometimes these are no more substantial than a line on a map. For the same reason, call me a socialist or a commie, I certainly don't think companies should control anything in space. Its entirely senseless to drag these divisions further into space.
You can dismiss me as a mad leftie who wants some form of global conciousness (which I admit is a very long way away) but would you like a repeat of the US vs China vs India vs Pakistan vs Russia vs Georgia.... over the moon say? We are already seeing one sphere in which geographic divisions are becoming more irrelevant in the internet (ofcourse I'd have a hard time telling this to Chinese bloggers today). On a day when N. Korea joins the list of nations to test nuclear weapons, do we need any more warning that developing technology before we develop a global conciousness is incredibly dangerous ad short-sighted.
Dear god yes Rockbox takes care of a shit load of problems - one your mp3s can be sorted by Folder no problem at all. Rockbox has a built in Tag cache system that can read your mp3s tags - you choose if you want to navigate your music by File view or Tag View.
Atleast using Rockbox for a cowon player if you hold down menu instead of a short press you get to a screen that will allow you to turn shuffle on and off as well as change the display (the ID3 based view or a folder view between all files, supported, music)
Now rockbox is far from perfect - no reasonable video and nothing from iTMS with Apple's DRM will work (though if you are using a creative player this ought not to be an issue) though you can dual boot the firmwares. You can put in album art through a custom WPS though its not nearly as smooth as the iTunes way. Also if you liked the iPod for its simple menu structure then you are probably looking in the wrong place.
Raptor: Call of the Shadows
Gods
Legacy of Kain : Anything but Blood Omen 2
Jedi Outcast
Wing Commander/Privateer anything but particularly WC Prophecy and P2
Leaving out Commander Keen and Barbarian but Gods was just so much more incredible.
These would definetly be the comfort games as opposed to favourite games - the games I load up over a weekend for a quick romp after a hard period. The favourite list is similar but includes Masters of Orion, Half Life anything, CoD 1/2, Diablo, Thief, Duke...
When did fanboi blog pieces become post worthy articles? Given the clear bias of that article I feel the need to respond and expound on why the iPod WILL DIE and lose a few karma points in the process. I also intend to be biased and obnoxious in response to said article.
1) They are just not cool
Apple is quickly losing its coolness factor with both the iPod and the Mac. Apple's control over the way its products look actually works against it as its products become more popular - I walked into a cafe last semester and saw a lovely row of people, all yuppies btw, using shiny white macbooks and it looked pretty damn ridiculous. Play count the white headphones once and then ask yourself if you want to buy a regulation white iPod. Yes its a landmark for miniturization that apple can make the shuffle so small that it can fit up your arse hole but making things small isn't the same as making things cool and it certainly isn't making them usable. (Reall fanboi's point 4) belongs here - he tries to make it a seperate idea but really its just one disjointed rant)
2) Its known... to be defective
Survey this page for the number of comments about defective batteries - sure you can get them replaced - or even buy a player in which they don't faint in the first place.
3) Price for features
the ipod looks competetive on price until you compare a feature list. Fanboi argues that people don't care about functionality and only simple looks and shiny colors. I don't. Give me an FM tuner and a voice recorder please - wihtout me paying 40 bucks for it. Zune will have Wifi and it won't be long before someone figures out how to connect it to the web.
4) see 1)
5) You go girl - accesorize that mutha!
Mmm iSkins for your iPod and headphones with glowing wires! Wee! Wear you glowing wire headphones - I think you look fucking ridiculous just like the idiots with those glowing rims for his car. Yes, please enjoy that fancy dock - I'm sniggering at you paying more than 100 bucks for a pair of crappy sounding speakers and a plasticky remote. That you don't use because you listen to your music from your shiny white macbook at home. With widgets!
6)The dinosaurs didn't like to change either
Fanboi claims that you will never change from an iPod if it was your first player and IF it worked well for you. So now that we've lost all those people who've had to change their battery or can't read the nano's screen anymore or found that click wheel unresponsive one morning, and all those people who are so sick of seeing everyone with whiteheadphones(TM) and all those poor cash strapped students who will happily save fifty bucks for noname player how many does that leave. Yours was alwaysa lonely world fanboi...
7) oooh fancy bigger hard drives! and a color screen!
Everyone has been introducing bigger drives - really fanboi actaully read release information before blogging. There really is a size limit for things beyond which there is not much point in making them smaller. I can wire up a really tiny calculator but its useless if you can't press its buttons. Unless your in Gitmo and Apple makes that iPhone you've not much need of something that can be lodged up your nether regions. And if Apple makes that iphone or that touch/widescreen ipod I will laugh as you get suckered into an even more rapid charge discharge cycle for that Li ion battery.
8)If you think MS is bad...
Apple is rapidly becoming a company that drops buzzwords and gives you useless users iCandy. Yes cocoa, yes shiny metal Aqua, yes expose - so pretty and so utterly pointless. Yes you love that little widget that tells you what the weather is now, so that you can look at it and be entirely confident that its 58 and its raining, and you no longer have to look out that little window (yes the real world thing that goes in a wall and occasionally has curtains) OOOOH a calculator widget - too bad you still haven't figured out order of operations from primary school and still can't add and divide. You brag about iLife but al
Nonsense. This is just a feature - buy a PS3 - it will play your Blu Ray movies, surf the web, play your music, study protein folding, and now warm your house too! Forget paying your heating bill - its the perfect Christmas present! Rumour has it that it can even play games.
A great present to send to any of your loved ones in the army serving abroad - hours of entertainment and when in a spot of bother the troops can combine 5 or more PS3s and a few Sony batterys to create a high power IED!
This is content provider paying for normal quality service from the customer's ISP not his own. They already paid their ISP for their high bandwidth bill. Also, they wouldn't be paying for higher quality service - they'd be paying for the not having their QoS artifically degraded.
Try to make an analogy between an internet transcation and a plane flight is pretty idiotic. You don't pay every ISP between your computer and some website for every packet you send. You certainly pay every carrier that you choose to go from A to B and you can certainly pay for the privlege of first class throughout but you also had control over where you were going and which airlines you were using. The neo-communist reference is just flamebait. You are a troll.
Mmmmm... CS makes for very realistic training doesn't it. We can magically appear on the map and select weapons and run and jump around real fast, even if we've gotten shot and when we die we get to fly around, la la la, and see how our teammates are doing against those mean counter terrorists. And what do you know after a few minutes we can start playing all over again despite dying in the previous round, and we even get money for losing!
I wish terrorists trained with counter strike to get good... I know a 10 year old who could kick all their asses.
Chuckle. But seriously...
No, no they aren't going to offer to install Ubuntu because then people would rarely get viruses and worms and the anti virus people again go out of buisness. Fighting viruses was really trying to fix the problem without addressing the cause - a swiss cheese OS. Anything MS does to tighten up security is terrible for these guys. In some sense the only reason the market existed for thse companies is because Billy and his company produced an insecure OS. The Gates giveth and the Gates taketh away. Sucks to be CEO Symantec, though I suspect people will still be buying their useless AV software for years to come "just to be safe." As linux distros like Ubuntu, Zenwalk and Vector become friendlier and easier to install though, MS and Apple are going to be hurting in the not to distant future. After all we all like free beer.
The only time you see sponsorship information if you are a paid user is on the sponsored community/features pager - neither of which you have to use. There are always going to be problems with viral marketing - atleast here you will be able to see clearly which communities are sponsored and which are not. There will doubtless still be viral marketing with comapnies making communities that look like they are grassroots stuff but just like lonelygirl the lesson is learn to use discretion. Or don't join them at all.
Huh. We used Debian on the crappy WYSE clients they give us as first years in grad school and I always wondered why the icon was different and IMHO ugly. The new icon did not cause any confusion at all. While I used Debian on my laptop it was still Firebird and I don't think they were using different icons then.
u nity-edition-policy.html
c on Also trivial.
o urces/firefox-icon-restorer.xpi
Theres no need to overreact and rename the damn thing FartingFox or some such. Debian can name it some like Firefox for Debian and be done with it.
If you make a damn community edition and then Mozilla tells you NOT to use the bloody logo. So renaming it really does solve this problem. http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/comm
However, most of us will agree that this is a stupid problem to begin with.
Changing a desktop icon is trivial. Here is a happy Mozilla page giving you instruction on how to change the titlebar icon and a number of other things. http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#app_i
So, Mozilla Foundation exactly why can't Debian change your damn icons (even if I couldn't care about their reasons for doing it) when you even tell us all how to do it. Are you going to start going after users because they choose to change your icon.
Most Debian users will know how to change the damn icons back but a quick google search reveals
http://downloads.mozdev.org/iconpacks/toolsandres
Frankly I liked the old Ships Wheel from Navigator the best.
My personal opinion is that both parties involved should shut up and code and provide people with a great browser and a robust distro, and more people will use both without nearly as much posturing.
You are trolling but I'll bite.
All scientific statements must be falsifiable - we should be able to test them and show that they are an accurate model of nature or we must show that they fail to describe nature. In which case we don't simply give up - its back to the drawing board to find a better description/model.
Please tell me how you think theism is falsifiable - please tell me of any measurement I can make to show that your belief that the universe is governed by laws set by an omnipotent god is in any way false. Please tell me how you think theism which lacks this basic feature of any scietific statement could in some way be the ground of the scientific method.
If the way nature behaved changed (and I really do mean the structure and character of the laws changing not just varying something like the fine structure constant or finding a new process in some privously unexplored regime) then it would have measurable consequences - astronomers and astrophysicists look into the past on a daily basis and if we find some system that does not obey the same laws you'd better believe that we'd pounce on it and do everything we could to explain it scientifically. Until we find such evidence the scientific method supports the simpler theory that the laws don't change over time and from place to place.
Ofcourse you could argue that the laws always change in such a way to hide the fact that things were different at some point but that clearly is not a scientific theory since its not falsifiable.
So yes until I find convincing evidence that the laws are changing I will support the view that they are not. I don't feel the need to pray to god(s) tonight so the omnipotent one(s) keeps my microwave working tommorrow.
Lookie. Vista Classic theme
Yes you can choose not to use any of the gadgets or silly extra garbage but I'd actually want to go further - can I completely UNINSTALL the gadgets and whatever allows Flip3d and can I completely UNINSTALL WMP/IE/Windows Mail/Photo Gallery/Calendar/Media Center/DVD and movie maker/Previous Versions and delete all the additional Windows themes that I won't ever use and a half a dozen other features. Probably not when Vista initially comes out but in a year or two maybe once third parties come out with software to do just that or MS are forced to allow you to remove some program because they violate some EU anti trust ruling. Windows is still my desktop OS solely for gaming - I use linux in lab and on my laptop and I value the ability to make things minimal - the rest of this stuff is fluff that I don't need and want is is a waste of perfectly good resources.
It is not just about getting things to look sexy - its about getting things to look different. Getting things to look different cosmetically is the first step towards actually making them different.
/.ers do more with their computers than Joe Schmoe.
I think the trend is to get rid of the PC as we know it and slowly replace it with devices that can only do specialized tasks - an Xbox for gaming, a Media Ceter PC that replaces your TV and audio system, a buisness PC for making that ugly slide show. Sell the same basic hardware, throw in a few specialized devices like that fancy new graphics accelerator and physics processor for the Xbox, a nifty tuner card and remote for that Media center thing and and make sure that printer and scanner only work with the BizPC. Make the software dumb "Click this button and everything will just work its so simple." Ofcourse you make the case and software look different so that Joe Schmoe could never even dream that his Xbox could run his little spreadsheet app no problem.
Sell all three to Joe, charge obscene license fees for the software - maybe pull a TiVo to ensure only your own software works with your hardware. While you are at it charge an extra 500 bucks because the Xbox case was designed by Armani and looks sexy.
This is great for buisness but it should scare most of you since
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