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Comment Surprising poll results. (Score 5, Insightful) 658

"Creepy, bland, or forgettable" is in the lead? Are you fucking kidding me?

Yeah, the last 15 years or so of his life were extremely dull musically, and super bizarre personally. But to outright not care about the huge cultural impact this man made in music and entertainment is saddening to me. Especially on Slashdot of all places. I thought nerds/geeks at least admired some of his talents, or liked a couple of his songs. Have most Slashdotters never attempted to do a moon walk? Did only a handful of you enjoy "Thriller"? Did most of you hate that uncredited episode with him on The Simpsons? Did none of you like the music for "Sonic the Hedgehog 3" and its eerie similarities some of Jackson's tunes?

These are a few of the things that I, as a geek, appreciate from Michael Jackson. I would not say I was that much of fan of his. I only ever owned one album of his (a greatest hits album), and I did not feel so sad as to shed a tear for him today. But I do appreciate his massive impact on our culture. I think the world was made more interesting these past 45 years thanks to him.

Comment Re:HD, yeah.. (Score 1) 410

If my math is correct, the pixel density on the "Zune HD" is roughly 167 dpi. If the resolution were 1280x720 on the same size screen, the density would be about 445 dpi.

I would say that yes, there would be a significantly distinguishable difference.

Comment Re:SP2 in A.U. (Score 1) 334

I, too, use automatic updates and installed SP2 that way. I do have automatic updates set to the "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them" option, though, if that makes any kind of difference.

The funny thing is, when windows update prompted me about a new "important update", it didn't say at all what it was. Just that it was a 300+ something megabyte file, to which I immediately thought "holy shit, wtf could that be". I figured it must have been a service pack, but I didn't expect it to come out of the blue like it did. I saw no mention of it on the news sites. I guess I was expecting some kind of fanfare before its release. Anyway, once it finished downloading and started the install process, it finally identified itself that it was indeed Vista SP2.

Comment Re:Won't solve a whole lot (Score 1) 364

As has been said, this product is not being marketed to Joe User. It's being marketed to businesses that rely on legacy apps and geeky power users who understand what it is they're getting.

Your average consumer will have the Home Edition of Windows 7, which will not include the built-in virtualization of XP. In other words, Microsoft is not promoting this to the average consumer as a way to make all your XP stuff compatible with Windows 7. Your average PC user won't even know that this "virtualization thing" exists.

Government

Utah Senate, House Pass Jack Thompson's Game Sales Bill 200

Ars Technica reports that the Utah State Senate and House have both passed Jack Thompson's proposed legislation that would stiffen penalties for the sale of M-rated games to minors. Oddly, on its trip through the state legislature, amendments rendered it largely ineffective; retailers are in the clear if the employee who sold the game goes through a training program, or if the minor misrepresents his age. It's also possible that the bill could cause some retailers to simply take down their ESRB-related advertising. Thompson's statements about the bill put the focus on advertising, but discussion on the Utah Senate floor had a familiar ring, touching on the story of a Grand Theft Auto player who killed two policemen in 2003. The ESRB wrote an open letter in opposition of the bill, saying it could undo the efforts they've made to popularize their rating system. The bill's sponsors fired back, questioning the industry's overall commitment to ratings, and now it awaits only the governor's signature before becoming law.
The Internet

Safari Beta Takeup Tops Firefox, IE and Chrome 342

nk497 writes "The release of the beta for the next version of Apple's Safari browser last week helped drive Apple's market share above ten per cent. The Safari beta has gained users at a rate of about 0.5 per cent a day since its release, topping one per cent by day four. For comparison, Microsoft's beta of IE took six months to hit one percent, Chrome needed almost a month, and Firefox 3 took a week."
Privacy

Utah Mulls a Database of Bar Customers 623

sundancing alerts us to a political dustup in the state of Utah, which doesn't have bars like the rest of the country does. Instead, "private clubs" require you to fill out an application and pay a fee if you want to have a drink outside the home. While there is pressure to reform this arrangement — one argument is that it's bad for tourism — the head of the state senate recently floated a proposal to create a database of every bar patron's visits. Now Utah's governor has called that idea "almost Orwellian," adding that "it's very difficult to legislate adulthood," and its supporters seem to be backing off. The idea of requiring bar patrons to swipe their drivers licenses as proof of age is still on the table, though.

Comment Re:The Magic 8 ball told me that a long time ago (Score 1) 540

Ah, but that does not fix the underlying problem. The underlying problem is the spend-yourself-into-huge-debt mentality that has gotten people into this problem in the first place! Bail them out now and they'll just find themselves back in the hole later.

You don't save a nation of starving people by supplying them with free food for one year. You save a nation of starving people by doing whatever you possibly can to help them become self sufficient.

Graphics

How To Make Money With Free Software 187

fons writes "Dutch Python hacker/artist Stani took part in a contest organised by the Dutch Ministry Of Finance to design a 5 euro commemorative coin. And he won, using only free software: 'The whole design was done for 100% with free software. The biggest part consists of custom software in Python, of course within the SPE editor. For the visual power I used PIL and pyCairo. From time to time also Gimp, Inkscape and Phatch helped quite a bit. All the developing and processing was done on GNU/Linux machines which were running Ubuntu/Debian. I would have loved to release the coin under the GPL, which could maybe solve the financial crisis. However for obvious reasons I was not allowed to do that.'"
Music

Walmart Caves On DRM Removal 215

cmunic8r99 writes in with an email he received from walmart.com yesterday evening about the pending shutdown of their DRM services (which we discussed a while back). Walmart has reconsidered and won't be shutting off its DRM servers after all. They are still moving to an all-MP3 store, but won't break all the DRMed music its customers have already downloaded; this because of "feedback from the customers."

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