But also forcing people to use more "weird" characters is just asking them to do something stupid like have the password on the screen in post it note form, where as a passphrase sure you may fail a few times but at least a normal person would be able to remember it in seconds as opposed to "23;w5f9s".

I am also a firm believer of passphrases and have been using them on everything that does not have an upper-bounds on password length.

Funny thing is i can recite their meaning and they are relatively obvious once you hear it once, but the problem is jumping in with no prior knowledge, there is no official I am new documentation one can look at, when i started all i had was a wikibook which is out of date now, which use screen shots from the 2.3.X builds. I imagine it will be more difficult once 2.5 gets out of beta,

That being said jumping into any 3d software is difficult, but does it have to be that way?

I noticed a common theme is the comments I can't say i disagree with it, but i also can't say i totally agree with it. That is considering what it seems is generally seen here as anti-consumer, From what i can gather the only bit of security (apart from the proprietary communication protocol) they added where security screws to take it apart, The summary did mention they update the dashboard software, but that is about software for the xbox 360 system and really has nothing to do with the Kinnect in the sense of getting an open source driver.

Another way one can put your complains "Microsoft is using a weird screw for its Kinnect they must hate consumers" come one guys it is not like the only screwdriver for it is locked away in Microsoft's secret vault you can buy one as easily as they did, do you say the same thing about nintendo and the tri-wing.

Also isn't part of the fun of these hacking challenges the fact that you are working through the puzzle that the producers hoped no one would try to or be able to break.

Now if in the adventure figuring out this driver we find out that if you successfully connect this to a computer the built in arm chip stores it some where and then the next time you plug it into your xbox it flags your xbox as hacked and bans you from xbox live, then we have an issue which being consumer friendly.

So not only are we outsourcing our tech support to India we are also going to outsource our health care. luckily if the robot surgeon breaks down tech support will be in the same call center.

In all seriousness there is also a legal issue here, where must a surgeon be licensed to do surgery to if the robot is in one country and the surgeon is in the other, health care practices are different between countries.

Now we know what the center of that Katamari is.

No fingers no trigger pulling action... not exactly a great killer robot,

You cannot sell your paper notes it is the intellectual property of your professor who made up the course material... haha according to some of the profs here at my school

I it is not just his opinion but i think agreed upon by some committee, not too long ago i was walking down the halls of the education department of my university and don't remember the organization that produced the poster but it stated that one could photocopy up to 10 pages from a book for each of their students and it is considered fair educational use. There were other things but that is the one the stood out in my memory, also it could just be a Canadian thing.

They have a sync protocol and it works, It is called the media transfer protocol. and according to the wikipedia page there are many plugins for different operating systems to make devices work.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol

Also why the hate on drag and drop, it is not like anyone is forcing you to use it, most of the media players you mentioned have plugins that lets their respective library's sync with devices that allow you to see the file system. Hell even windows media player makes media syncing easy with devices so you don't have to drag around your file system (it even can sync to a non-music playing thumb drive haha).

I had a sandisk player before and it had good support for audio books it played back from where you left it.

One last thing on your syncing thing, Microsoft's Zune uses syncing to get its media onto its device and by far i found it a more pleasant experience than i dealt with in iTunes

Nice history lesson, about the whole tenure thing i did not realize where it stemmed from but it is nice to know and too see how much it had changed.

On contrast my university's core CS courses are taught by people with papers but without a clue of practical application of the things they are teaching, This year I am in 2 core courses that are about practical technologies in todays world, Web Development and Databases, both subject I have been familiar with for a long time, and the shit they are teaching and forcing us to do through assignment is bad, from telling us to deploy a database schema with inconsistent naming conventions (for example using "no", "num" and "number" to denote a number for a element in a table), using SSN numbers as employee references, where each employee is tied to a supervisor who is linked by SSN just begging for identity thief if used in the real world, and potentially worse of all using the hidden html element to store vital information for the Servlet to process.

I would understand being out of touch with this stuff for a non-practical(more conceptual stuff) courses such as data structures and formal grammars but when they are teaching a course which will make people think they can add a resume items like "i know web development", or "i can design a mean SQL database" is just begging for a future of shitty programmers. This problem is directly created by this publish or perish problem you mentioned,

I cannot say much about other departments i know there is one chemistry prof here that does not teach anything in class and gets away with it because she is tenure.

I know this is idle and one should not care what is posted here but isn't this particular example a couple years old, i do believe when it was new it was posted to real slash dot, then again i am just going from the picture, because the link is broken...

oh wait a bit of digging got me there and yes the page is date 2006,

also why is idle not on the new comment system, i hate having to reload just to view a single comment.

They may not provide support for the older versions but the number of changes between version are mostly small and generally easy to upgrade, For instance I have a ubuntu 6.06 box which is currently running 10.04 fully from upgrades, how is this not the same as patches and fixes, these upgrades to me feel more like Service Packs than OS upgrades.

But this is about android, where there is a rapid support cycle like Linux, but the upgrade path is not as easy, possible or open as an OS upgrade on a Linux box.

To me it seems it is not a hardware variance issue, it is more or the OS variants it would be like if you have to support all versions of OSX or having to support all versions of windows9X on ward, choosing to be compatible with all will force you to not take advantage of the latest OS features(to full effect), and choosing to limit which version you support will limit your potential user base, like choosing a android 2.0 cutoff when there are still phones running 1.X (and new ones being made on 1.X).

Comparing it to windows is not quite right, because Microsoft sets a cutoff point for os support where as such a cut-off point would be against the open source way.

These graphs showcase hardware which as i said is not the issue, and OS variants of the same version number which is also not an issue, the issue is the jumps between versions and the speed or availability of average Joe upgrades to the OS

better yet print the code on the cup or the cardboard hand protector things.

Thanks you are right, I did say that the PS3 can upgrade to fit whatever messed up revision to the spec they desire.

Mostly the ones that cannot upgrade are the low end models, which most of people here would know to avoid but to the average consumer they might be more willing to save some cash. The ones who would also be more outraged when they find out their new device wont be able to play a blu-ray when there may or may not give any indication on the box or player which spec it follows.