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Comment Dangerous Chore (Score 1) 333

by gencha (#29774799) Attached to: Sneaky Microsoft Add-On Put Firefox Users At Risk
"a potentially dangerous chore, since a misstep could cripple the PC"

Wow, what a statement. There are endless ways to cripple your PC if you have no clue what you're doing. Hell, if you put the --delete in a 'find' call at the wrong place, that could cripple your PC as well.
You know what else is extremely dangerous and will most definitely cripple your PC? Ignorance about the system you are using. Computers are complicated machines. You can't hope to use one without having to learn how your system works.

It's like when your car breaks down for the first time and someone explains to you that you need to check the oil every once in a while. At some point you gotta look under the hood, otherwise you will break it.

So please spare me these observations about the outrageous hazards that come with your Windows operating system.
Businesses

Blogger Loses Unemployment Check Because of Ads 554

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the time-for-an-injection-of-common-sense dept.
Techdirt is reporting that one unfortunate, unemployed New York lawyer recently had her unemployment benefits greatly reduced because of the incredible $1/day she was earning via ads on her blog. "The whole thing sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare, with NY State asking her to get a form from her new 'employer' who didn't exist. Then NY Department of Labor started giving her all sorts of contradicting information, and eventually an 'investigation' into her 'business' — during which time her unemployment benefits were stopped entirely. She's now pulled the Google AdSense from her blog (total earned over the life of the blog $238.75)."

Comment Gimme a second here (Score 2, Insightful) 286

by gencha (#29700651) Attached to: Is Valve's Steam Anti-Competitive?
You think that if I pay money for a product that can be altered at an any time through the distributor or where the distributor can revoke my right to use the product at any time is somehow bad? I can not believe what I am hearing! Here I was thinking that it was totally awesome to buy a product which I could never resell nor would I have any control over. I personally think that Steam is an awesome platform and am very happy that all these DRM practices strayed far away from it.
Businesses

Banking Via Twitter? 193

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the what-not-to-do dept.
In the latest example of how just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, one credit union has decided to offer a new feature, dubbed "tweetMyMoney," that allows members to interact with their accounts via Twitter. Can't wait for the next version, "tweetSomeoneElsesMoney." "tweetMyMoney, available exclusively to Vantage members! With tweetMyMoney, you can monitor your account balance, deposits, withdrawals, holds and cleared checks with simple commands. And, you can even transfer funds within your account. It's all available on Twitter, 24/7!"

Comment Re:Windows vs Mac (Score 1) 366

by gencha (#29537737) Attached to: Microsoft Releases Prototype of Research OS "Barrelfish"
And here I was thinking it was actually called OS X. But roman numerals are SO much cooler indeed. Oh those amazing folks over at Apple, how do they never end to amaze us with their impressive marketing and their fabulous names for their operating system, thus making them far superior to everything else that is on the market. Thanks Apple!
Programming

Scala, a Statically Typed, Functional, O-O Language 299

Posted by kdawson from the means-scaleable dept.
inkslinger77 notes a Computerworld interview with Martin Odersky on the Scala language, which is getting a lot of attention from its use on high-profile sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn. The strongly typed language is intended to be a usable melding of functional and object-oriented programming techniques. "My co-workers and I spend a lot of time writing code so we wanted to have something that was a joy to program in. That was a very definite goal. We wanted to remove as many of the incantations of traditional high-protocol languages as possible and give Scala great expressiveness so that developers can model things in the ways they want to. ... You can express Scala programs in several ways. You can make them look very much like Java programs which is nice for programmers who start out coming from Java. ... But you can also express Scala programs in a purely functional way and those programs can end up looking quite different from typical Java programs. Often they are much more concise. ... Twitter has been able to sustain phenomenal growth, and it seems with more stability than what they had before the switch, so I think that's a good testament to Scala. ... [W]e are looking at new ways to program multicore processors and other parallel systems. We already have a head start here because Scala has a popular actor system which gives you a high-level way to express concurrency. ... The interesting thing is that actors in Scala are not a language feature, they have been done purely as a Scala library. So they are a good witness to Scala's flexibility..."
Social Networks

Twitter Offline Due To DDoS 398

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hate-when-that-happens dept.
The elusive Precision dropped a submission in my lap about a DDoS taking down Twitter running on CNet. It's been down for several hours, no doubt wreaking havoc on the latest hawtness in social networking. Won't someone please think of the tweeters? Word is that both Facebook & LiveJournal have been having problems this AM as well.
Music

Music Industry Thriving In an Era of File Sharing 174

Posted by kdawson from the told-you-so dept.
levicivita notes ZeroPaid coverage of a recent study by the UK music industry's own economist showing that overall UK music industry revenues were up in 2008 (study, PDF). The study is titled "Adding up the Music Industry for 2008" and it was authored by Will Page, who is the Chief Economist at PRS for Music, a UK-based royalty collecting group for music writers, composers, and publishers. From ZeroPaid: "[T]he music industry is growing increasingly diverse as music fans enjoy a wide range of platforms to hear and consume music. Sales of recorded music fell 6% for example, digital was up 50% while physical dropped 10%, but concert ticket sales grew by 13%. In terms of what consumers spent on music as a whole last year, this surprisingly grew by 3%."

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