Posts by J 3
773 posts • joined Wednesday 10th June 2009 16:06 GMT
Re: Inheritance
Why would they? Well, obviously they wouldn't do it out of the goodness of their little black hearts. But that's what laws are for. If there was one that said that DRM that can't be validated (due to the provider disappearing, for example) becomes null and void, immediately freeing the file in question, you can be sure they would be implementing the "inheritance scheme" very quickly indeed.
The tech aspects of this (namely, how to determine if the DRM is now dead) are of course open for debate. A non-profit or gov server to check whether the DRM in question is dead (as a fall back when the provider's server disappears) would be a possibility, I think.
Real solution would be the end of this silliness called DRM, but I guess it is a tough one to get.
Oh my...
Why is it that Microsoft adds suck so much!? I mean, there is no lack of funds to hire the best marketing bods available to mankind, surely. It must be congenital bad taste, I don't know...
Re: Oops About Neanderthal DNA! Change this quick Lester
Not necessarily. The original Africans did not go to meet the Neanderthals (nor vice versa), but do you think no one else has come back to Africa bringing those genes? Do you think all Africans have been sealed off genetically from the rest of humanity since some of them went to Europe? They sure haven't, and it's not due to modern transportation...
Before you start polishing your...
Sorry, got distracted there for a moment.
Anyway, I strongly suspect looking at that would get rather boring after the first few hours.
Malwarebytes declares Windows 'malicious', nukes 1,000s of PCs
They took the jokes way too seriously, methinks...
Re: And yet, and yet ...
If you need that kind of power, you are a crappy photographer. The icon should be a half-joke one, actually.
Re: Several points
"Although I'm not sure if rats, like humans only have 1 liver & 2 kidneys"
Yup, rodents have one liver and two kidneys. Actually, most vertebrates are the same way. Snakes are more modified, given the constraints of space.
More radical
I myself am for a much more radical solution, one that I will never see happen (will anyone? probably not). I mean the end of all borders. Damn things are just results of historical accidents that only exist in people's minds, and are just a mentality leftover from kingdoms. If money can go wherever it pleases nowadays, why shouldn't people be allowed to do the same? As a good side-effect, conditions should improve a bit everywhere, I believe. Because, let's be honest, people will only care about what affects them. If millions of Africans living in misery were able to go wherever they wanted, people in the "rich" world would try really hard to actually improve things in Africa for once, and corrupt Africans would try to be less parasitic of their neighbors.
Anyway, nothing I said has anything to do with H1Bs (I used to have one, in science, which is not restricted by the limits given to corporate use) but that was on purpose.
I know...
I know it's his money, yadda yadda... But that's just plain stupid. How boring must someone's life be to be interested in something like that, really? Don't take me wrong, I sure like the good things in life that money can buy. But a phone like that isn't it. It's kind of sad. Only thing sadder than that is that I don't have even 1% of the wealth he has, heh.
The smart ones jumping ship already
"Whitman, Californians and others might remember, supported the implementation of Proposition 8 when she ran for governor of that state in 2010 – but she has now changed her mind."
Ah, what a whipping at the polls does not do for one's conscience... First, Republicans for immigration reform, now this?
Re: Equality?
To say in a much less nice way that Rampant Spaniel... AC, are you really that stupid or do you just play one on Internet forums? Gee...
Buster
So, both companies that were mentioned had names beginning with Buster. Which isn't a world in Portuguese. So, the same guys creating the companies. It is very easy to start a "company" in Brazil, any person can do that. Just because it's registered with the government, it does not mean it is legit.
much comment in climate-sceptic circles
Gee, people nowadays even doubt that climate exists!? What have we come to...
Ubuntu trouble
The latest version of Ubuntu, 12.10, has been a disaster for me. Crashes like there is no tomorrow -- and soon there won't be for Ubuntu in my machines if it goes on like this. The interface? I actually got to like Unity after I learned its workings. A few hours work and I got really efficient in it. A "traditional desktop" (like the CentOS running KDE at work) slows me down now. But they broke the stuff under the hood, apparently, and if I wanted pretty shiny things that are crappy I would have stayed with another OS (ahem....).
Now, I know the .10 releases are usually supposed to be more bleeding edge, experimental, prone to problems. But I've been using Ubuntu for many years (at least since 2007), and have never seen such an unstable Ubuntu -- and that in two completely different computers of mine which had never had problems before running previous versions of Ubuntu.
I agree he is right that what Canonical did was bad, etc., but as someone mentioned above, he does not need to be a condescending paternalistic douche about it.
"Even if the feature were disabled by default, he says, allowing users to opt in still puts them at risk, because most won't fully understand what they're getting themselves into."
Don't take me wrong, I'm a fan of RMS and his work, but even if he's right that most people are too stupid to be discerning about this, no one has appointed him or anyone else the guardian of the innocent of the world, last I looked. If grown ups are not allowed to take responsibility for their own choices, then the world RMS wants (and I do too) will never come.
And, anyway, I suspect that whomever is too thick to understand what opting in to the Amazon search means is also very unlikely to come across it to even start wondering if it's a good idea, so opting in would not be that much of a big deal. Too bad it's still opt out.
Yay!
8% discount on Apple gear? Yay, that savings will be enough to pay rent this month!
(sorry about that)
Re: RE.What a load of bollocks!
...and they keep using economic ideas from the 1700s, with ideal little villages where there are 10 cobblers and you (the customer or worker) can just as easily go to another one if your regular one is misbehaving. Kind of hard to believe that type of thinking is still applied to another planet. I'm sure much else has been added to it, but still.
Also, corporations and capital can move around freely and much more easily than physical people. Might seem counterintuitive, but think about it.
And finally, if the EU corporations are not burdened by the costs of the corporate tax described, I imagine their workers must be better off there and the corporations' products must have a lower price (before sales tax, VAT, whatever) than in the UK. I don't know if that is the case, but I seriously doubt so.
Re: All OTT.
Yep, pretty much my conclusions in another comment.
I also tried generating pages (with the www.facebook.com/user1?and=user2 kind of link) of "relationships" between friends of mine who are not themselves "friended" on FB. It generates a mostly blank page. The most specific thing that appeared was "Living in city, state", since they live in the same city. So yes, generated on the fly, and visible by anyone, it seems.
Re: What's the big deal?
That's what I was asking myself too. It's not like typing the /us will allow me to see other couple's pages. Silly, yes; stalker-enabling? Hardly. But then...
But then I tried something else, which I do not know whether it was available before this. I went to a married friend's page. I've never met his wife, and she's not a "friend" on FB either. The word married in "Married to ..." was a link. When I clicked on it, it created a page showing the relationship. A URL of the form www.facebook.com/user_name1?and=user_name2
Of course then I tried to replace user2 with my user tag or whatever it's called. Voi là, a page showing my FB relationship to my friend. It's the same as clicking on the "see friendship" link on a friend's page. So, it's not couple specific, and nothing new I assume. Just a new, teenage-ish URL, to do something that was already possible. Or did I miss something.
Re: It's life, we're not that special...
Funnily enough, this reminds me of a "talk" I saw in 2003 or 2004, which was supposed to be about life on Mars. It was at around a table at a restaurant during quiet hours, with this engineering (as he described himself, although I doubt) guy speaking and some 6 or 7 people there to watch, and discuss afterwards. The title, which I don't remember, was intriguing. So I went.
Getting there, I found out it was arranged by some ministry. OK, that does not mean it will be bad. The guy started, and it soon became clear it was a creationist propaganda event, and all kinds of (the same old and discredited) attacks on the feasibility of evolution. The Mars thing? Well, the speaker's conclusion was that there could not be life, specially intelligent life, on Mars (or elsewhere) because such life would have to be "saved" (in the Christian way). And to be saved, there would have to be sacrifice of Christ over and over again. And apparently god "can't afford" (I remember those were his words) to do that. How about that, this guy knows god personally! Who'd have thought.
Of course this happened in America. The capital of Virginia, to be precise.
Re: How about actually making Ubuntu work?
Just because you don't know how to use it it does not mean it doesn't work. If you don't know/remember what the image editor is called, write "image editor", or even just "ima", and you get a list of image related programs with pretty obvious descriptions. But yeah, categories are gone, and that sure is not to everyone's taste. I say good riddance, because back then the struggle many times was to remember, or hunt down, in which category some more obscure program you needed would be. At least with Linux we have options for every taste -- which some will promptly say is Linux's limiting factor, but that's another can of penguins.
Re: It didn't.
Apple didn't decide my desktop should be a sterile wasteland without shortcuts, and without files.
I don't believe people are still talking about that. I am running the latest Ubuntu with Unity, and I have a bunch of files on my desktop area. Have no clue whether Gnome 3 also allows it though.
Re: Sheepsung?
Schrödinger's sheep/monkey (sheenkey? moneep?)
Will it do well?
I have no clue. I have the time to watch, since I don't need Windows or any other Microsoft software, for that matter.
But it sure is amusing to watch the cognitive dissonance kicking in amongst the MS shills... I mean, I remember them clearly saying that Linux (for instance) is different, and people won't ever use different (not contented, if a distro imitated Windows as closely as possible in interface, they'd then complain about lack of innovation, but that's a different can of penguins).
Now, MS creates something not just very different, but seemingly makes an interface mess of it, judging by the most common opinion out there. Will the shills now say "NO, MS, don't change the interface that much, people won't ever use different"? You'd wish, if they were consistently rational. But instead they say: "bunch of whiners, just force them to use it and after a few weeks/months [some shills are more optimistic than others] they will have always loved it".
Funny thing is that I think the second reaction is closer to reality in most cases (don't know if it will be in W8's case). Time will tell, fun times ahead, and lots of work for you IT guys, patching up W8 machines to look and behave like W7, support calls, paid for or not, ah the fun.
Re: Question...
Yes, it's been horrible for years already.
Re: Incredible...
My wife decided to play one of her games on her iMac today, only to discover the optical drive would not get the disc in (mechanical failure of some type, apparently, since the OS recognizes the drive as being there). She has other, recently bought disc-dwelling software laying around, like language instruction program and data CDs. I'm sure she will be glad to hear it's now all part of the past...
Re: Cut/n/Paste was Weirdly, I get on better with OpenOffice..
Grr... I meant Paste Special as text only is not the default of ctrl+v...
Re: Cut/n/Paste was Weirdly, I get on better with OpenOffice..
But, isn't that a Paste Special option?
Of course it is, but the OP said "by default". Paste Special is not the default of ctrl+v. I myself sometimes wish there was a way to do that, when I'm tired of doing shift_ctrl+v, moving to the "unformatted text" option and pressing enter. But I definitely wouldn't call it a major issue at any rate.
"The bill doesn't level the playing field up, but down: everyone must get poorer."
I suspect "everyone" is not an accurate term for here. I mean, in such situation, someone always makes a killing. And it's usually those who deserve the least.
Posted in Momentum builds for iPad Mini launch
Re: If this turns out to be true...
"Having neither I don't know, are they really that different?"
No.
Re: And the purpose of this element is...?
+1 for Japanium, just so the letter J finally gets in the periodic table. Ahem.
Posted in Apple slip-up slows iOS 6 upgrades
Re: ET - iPhone home
By the way, who's got the patent on that excuse?
Rockbox? Re: Apple Schmapple
I envy people who can type faster than they can think...
Have you seen the original post? It says iPod Touch. Ever considered that it is a hard to support device, given Apple's son-of-a-bitchery encryption that gets changed all the time just to screw third party coders (like the libgtkpod guys)? Rockbox's late 1990s-looking website does not even list the Touch in its device page. Their iPod FAQ page says that a crapload of iPod models (including the Touch) are not supported.
And that is why I had to boot into the Win7 that came with my "netbook" and install iTunes (shudder) in order to initialize the Touch and load all my music into it. Problem is that I now have more music and need to go there again to add it to the thing... Programs currently distributed with Ubuntu are almost there in the support for the new devices; I can read the iPod, for now, and can almost delete songs -- they are still listed in the internal DB, but don't play anymore, but no adding songs yet.
Re: How many commentators have paid their $20
Indeed... Anyway, in another, less lazy site I read earlier today a bit more of detail that could have helped assuage some of the commentards' anguish: the researchers tested the method in a more "obvious" case as a positive control, so to speak: they used it only on Latin languages to see what would be the chosen location, and the method spat out central Italy. From that they then assume that the method is working, which might be an overreach but I have no way to tell at the moment.
Now I have to log into the university network to get the original paper and read it myself, to see if they are not pulling our collective legs. Anyway, using phylogenetic methods in linguistics is not news; actually, many of the original phenetic methods started in linguistics about a century ago and were then adapted to biological research.
Yeah, what about Internet radio?
Some Internet radio is not purely so, since it's merely another channel to distribute the exactly same thing. But other stations are Internet based. What about them?
I myself am far from being a "yoof" now, but I have discovered all new music on the net for the past few years. I always carry my MP3 player with me in the car, and when I don't have it or the battery dies, I listen to a classic rock radio that plays very few songs I don't know -- even then they still surprise me with some unknown thing now and then. Other radio stations... I just can't stand listening to one hour of stuff I don't like just on the off chance that one interesting song might pop up. Only things on the (Internet or not) radio that I regularly listen to are specialized shows -- mostly specializing in metal, like TuffStuff (in Germany) and Backstage (in Brazil). Find plenty of new songs and bands through that.
YouTube and the like, on the other hand, recommends stuff that is "similar" to what you are looking for, and I've discovered lots of stuff I like that way. If you have the time and are curious, you can get caught in an infinite loop that way. That way I end up finding music in other genres I like which are not related to the specialized radio shows I follow, for example classic, blues, traditional... And of course what my friends post in social networks has more than once introduced me to cool new bands (Gogol Bordello is a recentish example).
Re: @naked as a JaylikeBird
Good point, and given human nature, not a stretch at all that it might have happened.
On the other hand, we know pretty well what happened in the past 500 years, but there is no evidence (yet) that any of the newer waves of humans killed off the previous ones. There are other possibilities:
- the older ones died before (more likely if their numbers were low) without other humans being involved;
- the older and newer populations did not meet in significant numbers then, and both genetic lines should be around today (apparently a study just came out showing three such different genetic lines are indeed present in the "native" populations till today, but I haven't read it yet so I might be misremembering);
- the older and newer populations mixed (mostly) without trouble -- I know, hard to believe these being people, but who knows.
I actually suspect we'll never know with enough certainty to be satisfied, but I'm fine with that fact of life.
Re: If you don't like looking at porn, then DON'T LOOK AT PORN.
"Höhöhö JDX, you think porn is somehow like beating up grannies?"
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fetish out there for porn involving beating up grannies...
Priorities?
Too expensive, the SSC? Well, nothing that a few days of military budget wouldn't cover...
Re: Pendant alert
And as Eddy Ito reminded us, the saying contains the expression "FIVE bob", not one, and 5 x 5 is... anyone?
Unique remote control?
Am I the only one who imagined a remote control with only one button? OK, sorry, I'll be on my way then...
Posted in Ten... pieces of tat for Apple fanboys
Meh...
The NotPad or whatnot actually seems like a reasonably funny joke. And that Jobs figurine actually looks much more like U2's Bono to me, but I guess it cuts on costs...
Makes sense...
Well, aren't Catholics all big on penance and suffering for your sins (and your ancestors' too, go figure)? There you go, then...
Er...
"If anybody does the upgrading, it’s business customers – especially those on Microsoft enterprise licences under programmes such as Software Assurance (SA), who are trying to squeeze the most life from their existing PC hardware."
Right, as everyone knows that "upgrading" to the next Windows version is a great way to get old hardware to work better...
Re: Unconvinced
"The publishers claim that it costs the same to do a real book and an ebook"
They might very well be lying.
Hm...
...and you guys apparently haven't gotten wind of the "gang of grandmas" yet! Still at large.
Pay?
"has helpfully suggested that scientists might like to pay it to get their research printed"
Eh? Many (most?) non-open access journals I've seen already charge some fee anyway. Just from the Cell journal mentioned: "Authors will be charged $1000 for the first color figure and $275 for each additional color figure." Apparently, if you don't have color it is free. Woohoo.
and Silverlight from Adobe
Sold, already!?
Meh
Not that I'm much of a measure for anything in this life, but... I hadn't heard of any of those things. They won't therefore be missed by me.
Posted in 2011's Best... DSLRs
Glass
Unless you you have plenty of nice Nikon glass, you'd make better use of your money buying the Pentax K-5. Similar performance and features, for less money. Only "problem" is that the brand name does not start with C or N... ;-) Anyway, nowadays all these have very similar performance... I stick to Pentax mainly because I have a bunch of lenses already.
I own a K10D, and recently bought the K-5, intending to keep the K10D as a backup body. Now I don't want to ever use the K10D again, so I think I'll try to sell it... But then again, I bought the K-5 body only and splurged on a nice Sigma lens, I'm sure that helped quite a bit.
