He has made it very clear that he wants the whole world to think of "iPod" when they think of an mp3 player, and yet the second that people actually do begin to genericize the word "iPod," he flips out.
He wants you to think iPod when they hear mp3 player - he does not want them to think any mp3 player when they hear iPod. Unfortunately for him people are. I have a Cowon DAP (X5L) but when the salesman at Best Buy asked if I have an iPod as I browsed the headphones I said yes because it was simpler.
Theres a RadioShack nearby that stocks a few Creative players and Sansa players alongside the iPods but the sign that refers to the entire section simply says iPods. You can ask the salesman there about an iPod and he will show you the Apple ones but will also show you the Sansa ones. I think consumers have pretty much decided that any mp3 player => iPod. Jobs did not want that translation to work in that direction.
I used to have 98 on my laptop - "upgraded" to XP when it was released - it was too slow (Thinkpad A22e) - moved to redhat, tried xubuntu, and finally vector as of two weeks ago. Vector is by far the fastest and was the easiest to install, and I'm a big fan - sound took some work to get to work and I had the usual headache with the wireless card and ndiswrapper but took no more than 2-3 hrs and some forum searching in total. Xubuntu had no configuration problems (other than the expected wireless) but even that was a tad slow for my taste. If the hardware can support it Xubuntu is probably the way to go for non *nix familiar users. They will never have to look at a terminal and never have to learn one thing about how the OS works. But if they are slightly familar with a major distro, Vector (or DSL I hear but I have not tried) is the way to go.
No distro I've tried so far is simple as 98 but the learning curve isn't steep if you use icewm. Distros like Vector and xubuntu are great on older hardware, and can easily be faster than 98. I really don't think the hardware support is so much of an issue anymore. IMHO the biggest headache is the software since anyone still using 98 is completely used to a particular way of doing things and any difference won't be easily tolerated. I converted my mum to OpenOffice (on windows but still gotta start somewhere) at her company since its free but damn that took some work. The temporary frustration in learning to get used to the differences though is far outweighed by the costs. They saved a small fortune on Office licences, and basically all they needed was Word and Powerpoint. Now think savings on office + antivirus, a faster OS and active support and convincing them to change from 98 might be a bit easier.
I share your complaint the name is unfortunate - I like to think of vim as "vi muddled". A lot of the new stuff reeks of feature bloat but that said you can actually turn it all off in the.vimrc, or just ignore something entirely. Unfortunately, you have to drag your vimrc along with you then.
vim is basically becoming a graphically-dependent editor that happens to use a similar editing structure to vi.
While its true that there is some creeping feature bloat I don't think its becoming more graphically dependent. I actually like to diffrentiate between vim and gvim, which is what this article focuses on. Its important to remember that you do not actually need to use gvim at all - even the spell checking can be done in the terminal (:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us and use CTRL X s to get your happy popup list -works in the crappy windows terminal that is default with cygwin). Most of my coding is done on a remote terminal so I don't use gvim.
If you want to avoid the feature bloat - Vector Linux came with Elvis as the vi editor so I've been using that off late and its a nice compromise. nano is a heck of a lot more new user friendly and is fine for most simple editing tasks, or writing short codes. Neither of them are very graphically dependent at all.
The major studios might have been able to control piracy by phasing out DVDs and using BluRay or HD-DVD with HDCP (and BD+ or whatever they are calling it today) since no one has convincingly broken HDCP yet (not that I think this won't happen). The hardware control and the key revocation actually gave them a fighting chance technologically.
This move is shooting themselves in the foot - lots of people on/. have said that the quality on DVDs is good enough and they wont upgrade - I won't because I'm a poor grad student who cannot afford to spend a 1000+ bucks on a HDTV because in the end its still a TV. Even if HDCP isn't broken they've left a gaping hole because CSS certainly is and so people can buy these combo discs and still pirate the DVD versions of movies using their DVD-RW drives like they are doing now.
Ofcourse they are caught between a rock and a hard place - consumers don't want to upgrade from existing equipment that many of them think is good enough and the stuios want consumers to upgrade so that they can sell the same content again in a new format and control piracy more effectively - thus the combo disc. Ultimately the worst case scenario is people like the combo discs so they cant stop piracy and people still choose not to upgrade, and they have to sell these things at prices similar to regular dvds now or people won't buy it. I suspect this will likely happen if they implement this.
As more and more of this crap makes its way onto YourTube, fewer people will actually use it and the site will fail and everyone will point and say another Web 2.0 failure. Intrusive advertising is great at killing mediums and peopel try to develop ways of screening it ou -blocking ads one of the bigest reasons to get a DVR, and how many of you use Adblock. If YourTube can't screen out "fake" videos those users will become cynical and stop using it.
What a shame to not have more videos of idiots lighting themselves on fire in creative new ways. The site is mostly "Stupidest Home Videos on the Net!" and the sooner it dies the better.
Guy claims he cheats because there will be modders on the other team Guy claims he wont stop cheating if no one else does and he is evening out the playing field Guy claims he can own the battlefield without cheating Guy claims that people who whine about him cheating should mod their own xbox Guy claims that everyone wants to cheat and he just had the nuts to do it
Guy is a whiny little bitch who cant play for shit. He makes up excuses to why he should cheat, claiming the otheres are , and therefore they are against him. He is deluding himself that he is skilled because he can cheat and applies his ill gotten success to when he played normally without success. He deludes himself that he is somehow being fair by restoring an even playing field. Essentially the reason to cheat ultimately remains the same - someone sucks at the game or has a perverse need to be number 1 without accquiring the skill to earn that position, and in either case the person needs a slap in the face and to be told that its just a game and it doesn't matter if you lose. Grow up.
We had a simple way of dealing with people who cheated in school - we'd not play with them. If its obvious someone is cheating quit and join a different game.
Just like Newton's models had limits and fell apart at some point, likely the same will happen to General Relativity when we're one day able to observe things beyond what the model can handle.
Absolutely, and with General Relativity despite its stunning success we know that it must fail at some scale because as a classical theory it simply does not match what we know about space at the very small scale.
The vacuum is a much more active place and while at the long scale it can be described my a nice smooth metric, we already know that it doesn't match up with what we already think we know from field theory. Though even QFT has problems particularly one thats 10^120 orders of magnitude large. These limitations don't make either GR or QFT useless, nor really wrong - incomplete but it is a good description of nature in some regime. So Newton is still useful today partciularly since we still live in a world where his theory still makes very adequately accurate predictions.
Even if GR has its limits its still a very, very powerful theory. What we know about the dark energy seems to indicate that it is a cosmological constant and the univese is asymptotically deSitter space rather than Minkowski. That by itself is one hell of a prediction to be able to make. Theres still a lot of work in GR both theoretically (just take a peek at gr-qc at the arXiv) and experimentally (including this observation, the APOLLO LLR, and Eric Adelberger's group and their beautiful Eot-Wash experiments) - its still being fruitful decades down the line. And just because there will be a new theory that supersedes it there is no way to throw GR out completely - theres just no way to train a physicist without introducing him to Newton's laws at some time. Theres even some merit to studying it for its asthetics - its a pretty theory!
The EUs complaints have always been about other applications like IE, Windows Media Player and and now the whole host of security programs that Vista will have like Defender etc. These go be installed by default and if there is no way to chose not to install them or in some cases like IE no way to remove them then MS is abusing its monopoly. IANAL but if MS did provide you options to remove these and not make various OS features dependent on them then the EU wouldn't have a problem.
I agree that MS should have clear options giving you control over what to install - even if its under some custom install option and shouldn't make the basic functioning of the operating system dependent on these programs - there is no reason an operating system needs a browser for instance but MS did try to claim it was an integral part of the OS. Ofcourse most people want a browser/media player/firewall with their OS and so even making it the default option isn't so bad, but we should be able to replace it with something that has identical functionality.
Sadly even if MS does give you the option of not installing their software, most users will still go for the default install and so even bundling completely optional software MS will most certainly become the dominant force very quickly. As long as those of us who want to do use alternate software can I don't necessarily have a problem with this because I think it reflects people demanding more from their OS. The danger is in a lot of people accepting MS default antivirus, which because they didn't apply Critical Update KB2702570213750153132.3e107, wasn't able to protect a lot of systems from the next W.NastyThing. A fake sense of security is as dangerous as no security at all.
For those of you who want to read more on it. I'm currently ploguhing through his paper and and a few others but if anyone of the top knows whether Lieu used sigma8 from the WMAP 3yr results and how he selected clusters and estimated cluster mass... Skimming Lieu's paper his conclusion already claims that it is not inconsistent with previous SZE data for individual clusters. Anyways back to digesting papers.
No one is denying that the information is public and anyone can see it - however it was practically impossible to track all changes in every friends profile, you didn't care about most of those changes anyway, and it allowed there to be a time delay between you changing some information online and someone noticing it. It was a good system because a lot of these people you presumably knew and interacted with on a daily basis, and it mirrored how an actual social environment would be. The new system puts these changes on an announcement board - this is not how a social environment would be. Therefore, it is going to be unpopular.
Facebooks privacy has not changed between the old and the new system - the new system just offers less privacy by design. If we don't want it we all complain loudly and go back to the old system. I don't question that they have a right under their EULA to change the layout but if they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot they will change it right back, or enjoy a few deactivated accounts.
Facebook is ALL ABOUT publicity. Yeah. Want a directory of those on your campus, sharing your class? Try your Admissions office, or the Department Secretary. Wanna organize? Post something in the Union.
One of the nice features of facebook is it gives you some independence from the admissions office and department secretary. They tend to be uncooperative and given a chance I'd rather rely on an online database for infromation than them. Maybe you'd also like to go back to paper registration for classes instead of using the web? Not practical in a university with 20,000 people really though is it.
Posting things in the union is rather last century - it denies the possibility of different campuses and can hardly target people with certain interests. Yes if you want no private information online don't post it - but every site you use online will log your activity and unless you obsessively use TOR you have no real privacy online so maybe we should all just stop using the internet. Not every site flashes your information even if it is not private to other users of the site. Stop being a luddite.
I maintain it'd have been much easier to get this information by having someone actually add the suspect as a friend on orkut and then communicating with them to get their personal information - after a court order so its not entrapment. So the logs that Brazilian law enforcement wants are very limited but the point was this could have been avoided all together.
Google needs to take a good long look at what information it collects and how it matches up your google account information to your google searches and how long it retains copies of your gmail. Don't be Evil is nice and all but the potential for massive damage because of a privacy breach is too great. Since they collect the information and you supply it I feel you have a right to see exactly what they collect at least. That will probably change the usage patterns of concerned users but most people don't care so their data would still have value.
Interesting they don't seem to be chargine people for writing open source decoders - I wonder what would happen if Sandisk only bundled its player with Rockbox which is open source.
I found out about Rockbox in one of the next iPod killer posts on/. a few weeks ago but I am already a convert. Its hard to brick your player with Rockbox. It is possible with a lot of the Rockbox players (including the Cowon players) to dual boot Rockbox and the original firmware (though the Rockbox firmware has more features video is not one of them). Its very cool to be able to customize your display completely, have search capabilities, and play doom (and other games) on my mp3 player. Yes highly recommend rockbox and cowon players (I don't work for either).
You are right ofcourse - most speed adjusters are throughly useless on modern cpus and you have to keep some old hardware around. Currently that is an old thinkpad a22e and that currently runs xubuntu but it'd be nice to have DOS on it as well. Thats the intention atleast - lets see how it works in practice. Theres much older hardware at home in India and presumably my high school is still using 486s.
Speed adjusters are pretty effective on it - the laptop 98 out of the box and while I was young and stupid. MoSlo works well to slow games down. There is very little trouble getting its sound card to work in games. Alleycat uses pc speaker so no worries there:D Also shame on you - the lack of a multitasking OS is made up for my the privlege of using edit to change your autoexec.bat and config.sys and getting mscdex to work. Repeat atleast four times a day for maximum satisfaction! That single command prompt was all I knew when I was a wee lad. If anything my only annoyance is going to be that when I first started using *nix I'd alias clear to cls and ls to dir and got out of the habit after a while. There is almost certainly going to be a recurrence.
DOSbox is an absolutely great piece of software, and I meant no disrespect to them, but its not without its shortcomings - try getting magic carpet to work on it - its actually too slow for some old pc games. I suspect it will be easier to get games to run in a true DOS environment rather than a dos emulator - mostly because the old games used to run in actual dos to begin with. Don't know how compatible FreeDOS will be but am optimistic. Irrespective of what you use - and I'm sure DOSbox is not going to die because of FreeDOS or anything silly like that - its really good to have one more avenue to get old games to work. ANd a whole load of posters have pointed out several other merits to having a true DOS.
This will probaly lead to the criminalization of anonymous open wireless networks - it will start by simply making people legally responsible for any usage of their network even if they left it open. Dear old Tammy wouldn't get away from the RIAA by leaving her wireless network open. Oh and dearie me imagine some horrible old paedophile uses your open wireless network to find some kiddie porn and you being held responsible. If you left your network open you were not thinking about the children!!! Those anonymous open networks will go away very quickly.
Public networks - please create an account to login and oh please provide us with a valid credit card number for verification only - and please don't mind us while we log all your traffic. The NSA believes thats necessary to prevent terrorists. Its legal to right under the secret section of USA/PATRIOT that we can't tell you about.../tinfoil
So many things to get from HOTU, so little time... no more mounting folders and general dinking around with DOSbox! Only dinking around with the real thing! Ahh the thought that I will soon see beautiful CGA graphics brings a tear to my eye. Alleycat as god intended it... sniff/nostalgia
wow a codec is spyware - inconcievable!!! Who the heck told you to download an unheard of codec which you probably didn't need. The vast majority of spyware is around because people download things they don't actually need from an untrusted third party source. I can't begin to count the number of computers I've had to fix because some twit downloaded a codec pack or opened an scr file in their email or downloaded some game crack to pirate a game and found it installed bonzi buddy.
Virtually every bloody codec pack you could download contained spyware/adware - some of them put in by the developers themselves. I've got some lovely versions of Nimo, K-lite and gordian knot to prove it. Hell, DivX pre 5.2 had GAIN in it and if you didn't know where to look on their website you had no way of finding the version without it (it didnt have the encoder so wasn't gain supported) . VLC is all I download for video playback now. If they don't support it I don't need to watch it - I've an flv file convertor for those of you who know how to download the dang yourtube/google videos that vlc cant handle perfectly.
Learnt the hard way not to download things from any third party site even if its trusted back in high school. I run XP because I like playing games. If I had a tinfoil hat I'd read the source and then compile and do MD5 checks but I'm lazy and will take the binary packages, and I suspect one day I will pay for that laziness, despite my use of Tea Timer and the Spybot S&D hosts file and immunization databse, Lavasofts ad aware, windows defender and rootkit revealer, hijack this, peer guardian 2, and spyware blaster. One day I will be an idiot and download a binary with some spyware that is still under the radar for all of these and I will be pissed when I realize it. Atleast, I will realize it, but most users wont.
Stop image spam in Thunderbird. Or use pine or something else text based. Does anyone know of a adblock like extension fith a filterset updater for spam - so many of us get the same damn spam something like this would be useful.
Have to give it to these guys +1 for creativity -783,114,039,832 for implementation. YOU LOSE!
Coincidence? - I had one hit and four misses. Looked for HDTVs and amazon matched, but they failed on cellphones, laptops, my textbook for this semester, the godfather dvd collection. Went to google each time, searched for item, went through a few links (4-5) and then went to amazon. Went to bestbuy for everything but the textbook. Cookies are accepted for session until I close firefox. JS and flash are blocked but I doubt that matters. Need a lot more data before can conclude anything one way or another.
Another test - clear all cookies and hit refresh a lot. Amazon seems to throw up the same links a fair bit - slippers and sandals, clothing, watches, jewellery, HDTVs, bags and luggage and a few dvds. The HDTVs popping up here is telling. Might be interesting to also get a new IP address each time and then refresh though I'll leave this to some of you who have a bit more time.
Thats crazy - nonody asked you to spend 400 hrs online accquiring that online item - you chose to put in the effort and played by the rules of the game world and got it - good for you. If that item was "stealable" even after you won in that is a rule of the game world and if it got stolen maybe you ought to have done more to protect it - you presumably leveled up a fair bit in the quest.
Otherwise, next time pick a game world that protects your 400 hrs worth of hard questing. Can't find one - too bad no one asked you to play in the first place. So yes they "stole" your 400 hrs of labor but they were playing by the rules of the gameworld the same as you. If those rules are deficient make your own damn game.
As far as the real world goes the items in the game world have no value to anyone but your game world players - and the only value they have amongst the game players is the value they givie it. Why should I give one whit about your uber special secret golden chalice that you quested 400 hrs for if I never play your game even. From my POV all you did was a play a game as did the other player and you both played by the rules of the game world.
No there is no problem here. If you did cry about your uber secret golden chalice that you quested 400 hrs for being stolen then you would be a sore loser and a whiny crybaby.
Whats next convicting people for saying something that kills your imaginary friend that you've had from childhood.
This "preponderance of evidence" is denying people due legal process. They haven't been convicted presumably because of the statute of limitations and yet are being declared sex offenders. Until you have convicted someone they are innocent and like it or not deserve all their constituional rights. I'm rather uncomfortable with retrying people in a civil court after being found innocent by a criminal court. The lower standards in civil courts make me uncomfortable in general. Heck even in criminal courts with their stricter standard of evidence there are mistakes where an innocent person is falsely convicted, even in some cases put on death row. A preponderance of evidence is just begging for trouble. I'd love it if someone under this new law (if it doesn't get stricken down) can get through siz years and appeal and have his name removed and then charge the state with unecessary harrasment.
Also you might read about sex offender laws in Kentucky. It was an interesting read from last month about a law restricting sex offenders from living within a 1000 feet of a school. I think it has a double jeopardy feel about it. The ACLU is on this one - the Ohio ACLU seems asleep on this latest development though.
A lot of posters have said this is just politicians crying "Won't someone please think about the children" but its not just politicians wanting to be seen as being tough but also the parents - if you read the article theres a feeling that "Sorry these laws are unfair but you shouldn't have done it." I dont think laws like this will ever go away as long as there are people who clamor "Keep us safe from terrorists/sex offenders/communists/atheists/witches/(boogey man) even if that deprives some of us of our rights."
I hope this law is found uncostituional but the solution is not passing laws and then having the ACLU fight for ages to get it declared unconstituional - its not passing them in the first place. I'm beginning to believe it my be worth having all bills pass through some intesive judicial review (no veto just a look over and a rubber stamp yes or a memo saying look at these bits a bit more) BEFORE actually being signed into law. This ought to be a much shorter proess than fighting the laws after they are passed. There is so much bad publicty to be had from opposing populist laws that its worth having another branch thats existence is mandated by the constituion be able to look at these laws and say "er... hold one one second."
If you follow this a bit - the reason there is too much fine print is that there are too many lawyers! The only way to get rid of lawyers is have them fight against other lawyers and have both sides talk each other to death! LAWYER DEATHMATCH 2006!!!! ILLEGAL!!! Alternately instead of getting rid of the telephone cleaners lets put the lawyers on a spaceship and send them of to another planet. Though lawyers being closely related to cockroaches might prove very hardly, and (d)evolve and leave the planet to take over the galaxy...
On a more serious note I agree with you - its not so hard for the better buisness bureau to require a summary that discloses all fees and limitations that most people will care about. Most companies could do it easily and the only reason they don't is because they make money off that fine print that you neglected to read carefully before signing. Cell phone companies love those cancellation fees, or extending your contract for a year or two when you change your plan or make any other change.
Also, as long as there is a "Terms and conditions are subject to change at anytime" clause then even a contract with no fine print is entirely meaningless. You can't really negotiate a contract with a large company and the choice on offer is so poor that it doesn't matter who you sign with you are going to get stuck with more or less the same contract. Sadly, the only way out of this is stronger customer protection laws and good luck getting that with all the corporate lobbyists pulling Congress' strings.
However, we do ask our agents to use their discretion when dealing with older customers. She added that the discretionary rule had been introduced in response to complaints that staff had mis-sold products last year.
I can see the point of being more careful with older customers - for a cell phone contract for instance you want to make sure they understand ALL the monthly billing costs (taxes, regulatory fees yada yada) and the contracts cancellation or change of plan terms, and then make sure they can actually use the phone. Take a highlighter to the necessary sections on the contract - that helps.
A lot of elderly people get it , and its important to not insult their intelligence, but a good number do not and it does not hurt to be careful. Most appreciate you taking the time to explain things to them clearly. The salesperson here didn't even try - either covering their posterior or simply unwilling to think independently. This will get resolved and she will get her internet connection but this could have been easily avoided by actually hiring staff that are willing to think or even giving them som e training to handle elderly customers.
I'm not on earthlink and don't have this problem but if it redirects to earthlink-help.net you can just add that entry to your hosts file no? Sure, sure if you run your own server but for most users...
This is terrible because most of the time the DNS error is just a simple typo, and most users don't need to see 50 links to websites that are entirely irrelevant to what I want. I think we need legislation that forces ISPs to just provide an internet connection and do nothing else. Quickly takes care of the net neutrality problem too.
I wonder if this is even legal because they are now monitoring search terms, and that could rather quickly turn to logging.
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He wants you to think iPod when they hear mp3 player - he does not want them to think any mp3 player when they hear iPod. Unfortunately for him people are. I have a Cowon DAP (X5L) but when the salesman at Best Buy asked if I have an iPod as I browsed the headphones I said yes because it was simpler.
Theres a RadioShack nearby that stocks a few Creative players and Sansa players alongside the iPods but the sign that refers to the entire section simply says iPods. You can ask the salesman there about an iPod and he will show you the Apple ones but will also show you the Sansa ones. I think consumers have pretty much decided that any mp3 player => iPod. Jobs did not want that translation to work in that direction.
I used to have 98 on my laptop - "upgraded" to XP when it was released - it was too slow (Thinkpad A22e) - moved to redhat, tried xubuntu, and finally vector as of two weeks ago. Vector is by far the fastest and was the easiest to install, and I'm a big fan - sound took some work to get to work and I had the usual headache with the wireless card and ndiswrapper but took no more than 2-3 hrs and some forum searching in total. Xubuntu had no configuration problems (other than the expected wireless) but even that was a tad slow for my taste. If the hardware can support it Xubuntu is probably the way to go for non *nix familiar users. They will never have to look at a terminal and never have to learn one thing about how the OS works. But if they are slightly familar with a major distro, Vector (or DSL I hear but I have not tried) is the way to go.
No distro I've tried so far is simple as 98 but the learning curve isn't steep if you use icewm. Distros like Vector and xubuntu are great on older hardware, and can easily be faster than 98. I really don't think the hardware support is so much of an issue anymore. IMHO the biggest headache is the software since anyone still using 98 is completely used to a particular way of doing things and any difference won't be easily tolerated. I converted my mum to OpenOffice (on windows but still gotta start somewhere) at her company since its free but damn that took some work. The temporary frustration in learning to get used to the differences though is far outweighed by the costs. They saved a small fortune on Office licences, and basically all they needed was Word and Powerpoint. Now think savings on office + antivirus, a faster OS and active support and convincing them to change from 98 might be a bit easier.
While its true that there is some creeping feature bloat I don't think its becoming more graphically dependent. I actually like to diffrentiate between vim and gvim, which is what this article focuses on. Its important to remember that you do not actually need to use gvim at all - even the spell checking can be done in the terminal (:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us and use CTRL X s to get your happy popup list -works in the crappy windows terminal that is default with cygwin). Most of my coding is done on a remote terminal so I don't use gvim.
If you want to avoid the feature bloat - Vector Linux came with Elvis as the vi editor so I've been using that off late and its a nice compromise. nano is a heck of a lot more new user friendly and is fine for most simple editing tasks, or writing short codes. Neither of them are very graphically dependent at all.
The major studios might have been able to control piracy by phasing out DVDs and using BluRay or HD-DVD with HDCP (and BD+ or whatever they are calling it today) since no one has convincingly broken HDCP yet (not that I think this won't happen). The hardware control and the key revocation actually gave them a fighting chance technologically.
/. have said that the quality on DVDs is good enough and they wont upgrade - I won't because I'm a poor grad student who cannot afford to spend a 1000+ bucks on a HDTV because in the end its still a TV. Even if HDCP isn't broken they've left a gaping hole because CSS certainly is and so people can buy these combo discs and still pirate the DVD versions of movies using their DVD-RW drives like they are doing now.
This move is shooting themselves in the foot - lots of people on
Ofcourse they are caught between a rock and a hard place - consumers don't want to upgrade from existing equipment that many of them think is good enough and the stuios want consumers to upgrade so that they can sell the same content again in a new format and control piracy more effectively - thus the combo disc. Ultimately the worst case scenario is people like the combo discs so they cant stop piracy and people still choose not to upgrade, and they have to sell these things at prices similar to regular dvds now or people won't buy it. I suspect this will likely happen if they implement this.
As more and more of this crap makes its way onto YourTube, fewer people will actually use it and the site will fail and everyone will point and say another Web 2.0 failure. Intrusive advertising is great at killing mediums and peopel try to develop ways of screening it ou -blocking ads one of the bigest reasons to get a DVR, and how many of you use Adblock. If YourTube can't screen out "fake" videos those users will become cynical and stop using it.
What a shame to not have more videos of idiots lighting themselves on fire in creative new ways. The site is mostly "Stupidest Home Videos on the Net!" and the sooner it dies the better.
Guy claims he cheats because there will be modders on the other team
Guy claims he wont stop cheating if no one else does and he is evening out the playing field
Guy claims he can own the battlefield without cheating
Guy claims that people who whine about him cheating should mod their own xbox
Guy claims that everyone wants to cheat and he just had the nuts to do it
Guy is a whiny little bitch who cant play for shit. He makes up excuses to why he should cheat, claiming the otheres are , and therefore they are against him. He is deluding himself that he is skilled because he can cheat and applies his ill gotten success to when he played normally without success. He deludes himself that he is somehow being fair by restoring an even playing field. Essentially the reason to cheat ultimately remains the same - someone sucks at the game or has a perverse need to be number 1 without accquiring the skill to earn that position, and in either case the person needs a slap in the face and to be told that its just a game and it doesn't matter if you lose. Grow up.
We had a simple way of dealing with people who cheated in school - we'd not play with them. If its obvious someone is cheating quit and join a different game.
Absolutely, and with General Relativity despite its stunning success we know that it must fail at some scale because as a classical theory it simply does not match what we know about space at the very small scale.
The vacuum is a much more active place and while at the long scale it can be described my a nice smooth metric, we already know that it doesn't match up with what we already think we know from field theory. Though even QFT has problems particularly one thats 10^120 orders of magnitude large. These limitations don't make either GR or QFT useless, nor really wrong - incomplete but it is a good description of nature in some regime. So Newton is still useful today partciularly since we still live in a world where his theory still makes very adequately accurate predictions.
Even if GR has its limits its still a very, very powerful theory. What we know about the dark energy seems to indicate that it is a cosmological constant and the univese is asymptotically deSitter space rather than Minkowski. That by itself is one hell of a prediction to be able to make. Theres still a lot of work in GR both theoretically (just take a peek at gr-qc at the arXiv) and experimentally (including this observation, the APOLLO LLR, and Eric Adelberger's group and their beautiful Eot-Wash experiments) - its still being fruitful decades down the line. And just because there will be a new theory that supersedes it there is no way to throw GR out completely - theres just no way to train a physicist without introducing him to Newton's laws at some time. Theres even some merit to studying it for its asthetics - its a pretty theory!
The EUs complaints have always been about other applications like IE, Windows Media Player and and now the whole host of security programs that Vista will have like Defender etc. These go be installed by default and if there is no way to chose not to install them or in some cases like IE no way to remove them then MS is abusing its monopoly. IANAL but if MS did provide you options to remove these and not make various OS features dependent on them then the EU wouldn't have a problem.
I agree that MS should have clear options giving you control over what to install - even if its under some custom install option and shouldn't make the basic functioning of the operating system dependent on these programs - there is no reason an operating system needs a browser for instance but MS did try to claim it was an integral part of the OS. Ofcourse most people want a browser/media player/firewall with their OS and so even making it the default option isn't so bad, but we should be able to replace it with something that has identical functionality.
Sadly even if MS does give you the option of not installing their software, most users will still go for the default install and so even bundling completely optional software MS will most certainly become the dominant force very quickly. As long as those of us who want to do use alternate software can I don't necessarily have a problem with this because I think it reflects people demanding more from their OS. The danger is in a lot of people accepting MS default antivirus, which because they didn't apply Critical Update KB2702570213750153132.3e107, wasn't able to protect a lot of systems from the next W.NastyThing. A fake sense of security is as dangerous as no security at all.
For those of you who want to read more on it. I'm currently ploguhing through his paper and and a few others but if anyone of the top knows whether Lieu used sigma8 from the WMAP 3yr results and how he selected clusters and estimated cluster mass... Skimming Lieu's paper his conclusion already claims that it is not inconsistent with previous SZE data for individual clusters. Anyways back to digesting papers.
Linkys
A primer on the SZE
[PDF WARNING]
Their paper on astro-ph
The WMAP 3 year results paper
[/PDF WARNING]
No one is denying that the information is public and anyone can see it - however it was practically impossible to track all changes in every friends profile, you didn't care about most of those changes anyway, and it allowed there to be a time delay between you changing some information online and someone noticing it. It was a good system because a lot of these people you presumably knew and interacted with on a daily basis, and it mirrored how an actual social environment would be. The new system puts these changes on an announcement board - this is not how a social environment would be. Therefore, it is going to be unpopular.
Facebooks privacy has not changed between the old and the new system - the new system just offers less privacy by design. If we don't want it we all complain loudly and go back to the old system. I don't question that they have a right under their EULA to change the layout but if they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot they will change it right back, or enjoy a few deactivated accounts.
One of the nice features of facebook is it gives you some independence from the admissions office and department secretary. They tend to be uncooperative and given a chance I'd rather rely on an online database for infromation than them. Maybe you'd also like to go back to paper registration for classes instead of using the web? Not practical in a university with 20,000 people really though is it.
Posting things in the union is rather last century - it denies the possibility of different campuses and can hardly target people with certain interests. Yes if you want no private information online don't post it - but every site you use online will log your activity and unless you obsessively use TOR you have no real privacy online so maybe we should all just stop using the internet. Not every site flashes your information even if it is not private to other users of the site. Stop being a luddite.
In Soviet Russia machine cast your vote for you... wait shit that happens here too
I maintain it'd have been much easier to get this information by having someone actually add the suspect as a friend on orkut and then communicating with them to get their personal information - after a court order so its not entrapment. So the logs that Brazilian law enforcement wants are very limited but the point was this could have been avoided all together.
Google needs to take a good long look at what information it collects and how it matches up your google account information to your google searches and how long it retains copies of your gmail. Don't be Evil is nice and all but the potential for massive damage because of a privacy breach is too great. Since they collect the information and you supply it I feel you have a right to see exactly what they collect at least. That will probably change the usage patterns of concerned users but most people don't care so their data would still have value.
Interesting they don't seem to be chargine people for writing open source decoders - I wonder what would happen if Sandisk only bundled its player with Rockbox which is open source.
/. a few weeks ago but I am already a convert. Its hard to brick your player with Rockbox. It is possible with a lot of the Rockbox players (including the Cowon players) to dual boot Rockbox and the original firmware (though the Rockbox firmware has more features video is not one of them). Its very cool to be able to customize your display completely, have search capabilities, and play doom (and other games) on my mp3 player. Yes highly recommend rockbox and cowon players (I don't work for either).
I found out about Rockbox in one of the next iPod killer posts on
You are right ofcourse - most speed adjusters are throughly useless on modern cpus and you have to keep some old hardware around. Currently that is an old thinkpad a22e and that currently runs xubuntu but it'd be nice to have DOS on it as well. Thats the intention atleast - lets see how it works in practice. Theres much older hardware at home in India and presumably my high school is still using 486s.
:D Also shame on you - the lack of a multitasking OS is made up for my the privlege of using edit to change your autoexec.bat and config.sys and getting mscdex to work. Repeat atleast four times a day for maximum satisfaction! That single command prompt was all I knew when I was a wee lad. If anything my only annoyance is going to be that when I first started using *nix I'd alias clear to cls and ls to dir and got out of the habit after a while. There is almost certainly going to be a recurrence.
Speed adjusters are pretty effective on it - the laptop 98 out of the box and while I was young and stupid. MoSlo works well to slow games down. There is very little trouble getting its sound card to work in games. Alleycat uses pc speaker so no worries there
DOSbox is an absolutely great piece of software, and I meant no disrespect to them, but its not without its shortcomings - try getting magic carpet to work on it - its actually too slow for some old pc games. I suspect it will be easier to get games to run in a true DOS environment rather than a dos emulator - mostly because the old games used to run in actual dos to begin with. Don't know how compatible FreeDOS will be but am optimistic. Irrespective of what you use - and I'm sure DOSbox is not going to die because of FreeDOS or anything silly like that - its really good to have one more avenue to get old games to work. ANd a whole load of posters have pointed out several other merits to having a true DOS.
This will probaly lead to the criminalization of anonymous open wireless networks - it will start by simply making people legally responsible for any usage of their network even if they left it open. Dear old Tammy wouldn't get away from the RIAA by leaving her wireless network open. Oh and dearie me imagine some horrible old paedophile uses your open wireless network to find some kiddie porn and you being held responsible. If you left your network open you were not thinking about the children!!! Those anonymous open networks will go away very quickly.
/tinfoil
Public networks - please create an account to login and oh please provide us with a valid credit card number for verification only - and please don't mind us while we log all your traffic. The NSA believes thats necessary to prevent terrorists. Its legal to right under the secret section of USA/PATRIOT that we can't tell you about...
So many things to get from HOTU, so little time... /nostalgia
no more mounting folders and general dinking around with DOSbox! Only dinking around with the real thing! Ahh the thought that I will soon see beautiful CGA graphics brings a tear to my eye. Alleycat as god intended it... sniff
wow a codec is spyware - inconcievable!!! Who the heck told you to download an unheard of codec which you probably didn't need. The vast majority of spyware is around because people download things they don't actually need from an untrusted third party source. I can't begin to count the number of computers I've had to fix because some twit downloaded a codec pack or opened an scr file in their email or downloaded some game crack to pirate a game and found it installed bonzi buddy.
Virtually every bloody codec pack you could download contained spyware/adware - some of them put in by the developers themselves. I've got some lovely versions of Nimo, K-lite and gordian knot to prove it. Hell, DivX pre 5.2 had GAIN in it and if you didn't know where to look on their website you had no way of finding the version without it (it didnt have the encoder so wasn't gain supported) . VLC is all I download for video playback now. If they don't support it I don't need to watch it - I've an flv file convertor for those of you who know how to download the dang yourtube/google videos that vlc cant handle perfectly.
Learnt the hard way not to download things from any third party site even if its trusted back in high school. I run XP because I like playing games. If I had a tinfoil hat I'd read the source and then compile and do MD5 checks but I'm lazy and will take the binary packages, and I suspect one day I will pay for that laziness, despite my use of Tea Timer and the Spybot S&D hosts file and immunization databse, Lavasofts ad aware, windows defender and rootkit revealer, hijack this, peer guardian 2, and spyware blaster. One day I will be an idiot and download a binary with some spyware that is still under the radar for all of these and I will be pissed when I realize it. Atleast, I will realize it, but most users wont.
Stop image spam in Thunderbird. Or use pine or something else text based. Does anyone know of a adblock like extension fith a filterset updater for spam - so many of us get the same damn spam something like this would be useful.
Have to give it to these guys +1 for creativity -783,114,039,832 for implementation. YOU LOSE!
Coincidence? - I had one hit and four misses. Looked for HDTVs and amazon matched, but they failed on cellphones, laptops, my textbook for this semester, the godfather dvd collection. Went to google each time, searched for item, went through a few links (4-5) and then went to amazon. Went to bestbuy for everything but the textbook. Cookies are accepted for session until I close firefox. JS and flash are blocked but I doubt that matters. Need a lot more data before can conclude anything one way or another.
Another test - clear all cookies and hit refresh a lot. Amazon seems to throw up the same links a fair bit - slippers and sandals, clothing, watches, jewellery, HDTVs, bags and luggage and a few dvds. The HDTVs popping up here is telling. Might be interesting to also get a new IP address each time and then refresh though I'll leave this to some of you who have a bit more time.
Thats crazy - nonody asked you to spend 400 hrs online accquiring that online item - you chose to put in the effort and played by the rules of the game world and got it - good for you. If that item was "stealable" even after you won in that is a rule of the game world and if it got stolen maybe you ought to have done more to protect it - you presumably leveled up a fair bit in the quest.
Otherwise, next time pick a game world that protects your 400 hrs worth of hard questing. Can't find one - too bad no one asked you to play in the first place. So yes they "stole" your 400 hrs of labor but they were playing by the rules of the gameworld the same as you. If those rules are deficient make your own damn game.
As far as the real world goes the items in the game world have no value to anyone but your game world players - and the only value they have amongst the game players is the value they givie it. Why should I give one whit about your uber special secret golden chalice that you quested 400 hrs for if I never play your game even. From my POV all you did was a play a game as did the other player and you both played by the rules of the game world.
No there is no problem here. If you did cry about your uber secret golden chalice that you quested 400 hrs for being stolen then you would be a sore loser and a whiny crybaby.
Whats next convicting people for saying something that kills your imaginary friend that you've had from childhood.
You can use Google to google it and you might find something interesting on the Google Research blog.
This "preponderance of evidence" is denying people due legal process. They haven't been convicted presumably because of the statute of limitations and yet are being declared sex offenders. Until you have convicted someone they are innocent and like it or not deserve all their constituional rights. I'm rather uncomfortable with retrying people in a civil court after being found innocent by a criminal court. The lower standards in civil courts make me uncomfortable in general. Heck even in criminal courts with their stricter standard of evidence there are mistakes where an innocent person is falsely convicted, even in some cases put on death row. A preponderance of evidence is just begging for trouble. I'd love it if someone under this new law (if it doesn't get stricken down) can get through siz years and appeal and have his name removed and then charge the state with unecessary harrasment.
Also you might read about sex offender laws in Kentucky. It was an interesting read from last month about a law restricting sex offenders from living within a 1000 feet of a school. I think it has a double jeopardy feel about it. The ACLU is on this one - the Ohio ACLU seems asleep on this latest development though.
A lot of posters have said this is just politicians crying "Won't someone please think about the children" but its not just politicians wanting to be seen as being tough but also the parents - if you read the article theres a feeling that "Sorry these laws are unfair but you shouldn't have done it." I dont think laws like this will ever go away as long as there are people who clamor "Keep us safe from terrorists/sex offenders/communists/atheists/witches/(boogey man) even if that deprives some of us of our rights."
I hope this law is found uncostituional but the solution is not passing laws and then having the ACLU fight for ages to get it declared unconstituional - its not passing them in the first place. I'm beginning to believe it my be worth having all bills pass through some intesive judicial review (no veto just a look over and a rubber stamp yes or a memo saying look at these bits a bit more) BEFORE actually being signed into law. This ought to be a much shorter proess than fighting the laws after they are passed. There is so much bad publicty to be had from opposing populist laws that its worth having another branch thats existence is mandated by the constituion be able to look at these laws and say "er... hold one one second."
If you follow this a bit - the reason there is too much fine print is that there are too many lawyers! The only way to get rid of lawyers is have them fight against other lawyers and have both sides talk each other to death! LAWYER DEATHMATCH 2006!!!! ILLEGAL!!!
Alternately instead of getting rid of the telephone cleaners lets put the lawyers on a spaceship and send them of to another planet. Though lawyers being closely related to cockroaches might prove very hardly, and (d)evolve and leave the planet to take over the galaxy...
On a more serious note I agree with you - its not so hard for the better buisness bureau to require a summary that discloses all fees and limitations that most people will care about. Most companies could do it easily and the only reason they don't is because they make money off that fine print that you neglected to read carefully before signing. Cell phone companies love those cancellation fees, or extending your contract for a year or two when you change your plan or make any other change.
Also, as long as there is a "Terms and conditions are subject to change at anytime" clause then even a contract with no fine print is entirely meaningless. You can't really negotiate a contract with a large company and the choice on offer is so poor that it doesn't matter who you sign with you are going to get stuck with more or less the same contract. Sadly, the only way out of this is stronger customer protection laws and good luck getting that with all the corporate lobbyists pulling Congress' strings.
I can see the point of being more careful with older customers - for a cell phone contract for instance you want to make sure they understand ALL the monthly billing costs (taxes, regulatory fees yada yada) and the contracts cancellation or change of plan terms, and then make sure they can actually use the phone. Take a highlighter to the necessary sections on the contract - that helps.
A lot of elderly people get it , and its important to not insult their intelligence, but a good number do not and it does not hurt to be careful. Most appreciate you taking the time to explain things to them clearly. The salesperson here didn't even try - either covering their posterior or simply unwilling to think independently. This will get resolved and she will get her internet connection but this could have been easily avoided by actually hiring staff that are willing to think or even giving them som e training to handle elderly customers.
I'm not on earthlink and don't have this problem but if it redirects to earthlink-help.net you can just add that entry to your hosts file no? Sure, sure if you run your own server but for most users...
This is terrible because most of the time the DNS error is just a simple typo, and most users don't need to see 50 links to websites that are entirely irrelevant to what I want. I think we need legislation that forces ISPs to just provide an internet connection and do nothing else. Quickly takes care of the net neutrality problem too.
I wonder if this is even legal because they are now monitoring search terms, and that could rather quickly turn to logging.