Comment Javelin Catching! (Score 5, Funny) 207
Obviously the greatest sport never played. Javelin Catching!
Comment COWBOY NEIL???? (Score 1) 336
Damn, where's my Cowboy Neil option?
I'm sure seeing him vampire hunt would be hilarious!
Comment Windows Mobile (Score 1) 1027
I have had a Windows 6 phone and a Windows 7 phone. Windows 6 was basically a short screen version of Windows XP. One reason I had for sticking with Windows phones was their interoperability with their other products (such as MSSQL, IIS, Exchange, etc) and the other products previous versions. However, Windows 7 phones won't interact properly with certain older email servers at least without a patch to the phone.
And in my case, AT&T won't roll that patch out. In theory, this means I might have a beef with AT&T but I'd think that Microsoft would put better compatibility software from the beginning.
Next time, I'll probably go with an iPhone since I already know they work and it'll be easier on trying to track down accessories.
And in my case, AT&T won't roll that patch out. In theory, this means I might have a beef with AT&T but I'd think that Microsoft would put better compatibility software from the beginning.
Next time, I'll probably go with an iPhone since I already know they work and it'll be easier on trying to track down accessories.
Comment Re:Sometimes Yes You Do (Score 1) 520
Here's the thing - I could spend another 6 hours troubleshooting the new 3rd party driver, or finding it, only to be in the same spot I'm at now. Or I could nip out to the local retailer, buy a card, slap it in, download and install drivers for it, and I know that'll work. The question is how much money is my time worth? Hence why the title of the post is 'Sometimes Yes You Do'.
Comment Re:Sometimes Yes You Do (Score 1) 520
Hence why 'Sometimes'
Comment Sometimes Yes You Do (Score 2, Informative) 520
I have a MB with a built in RealTek sound 'card'. I also run Windows XP 64, cause I'm crazy. The RealTek system for XP 64 is notoriously unstable. When I played Champions Online, the game would disable the sound because it could and would crash the program. Borderlands took it the other route - you can run the program, but you will always crash when you hit level 10, due to the special level 'ding' sound for level 10. Solution? Get a sound card, or a new OS.
Comment This is about business (Score 2, Interesting) 1695
This is about business - if you write a book, you generally can't force somebody to publish it. Nobody can prevent you from writing it.
My own personal guess is that there's two reasons for this move:
1) The cost of containing damage from activist and/or religious hackers is higher than the income brought in by the offending site.
2) The loss of income from muslim clients is greater than the income brought in by the offending site.
Let's be clear - you have a freedom of speech in the US. And a freedom of religion. But you can't make Putnam Books publish to get your message out there.
Comment Size Limits on Email (Score 2, Insightful) 126
More than just free email limits size. Size limits are one of the variables you can set in Exchange 2003, and I believe the default maximum email size is 5MB. Given that most private organizations do not have unlimited email space, setting a limit on size is just as important as monitoring the size of the Information Store.
(Fair warning, I may be wrong about the specific default max email size for exchange 2k3.)
Comment Re:CowboyNeal (Score 1) 571
After seeing left 4 dead, and any other zombie movie/game you care to name, I'm kind of happy to see the lack of a Cowboy Neil option.
Comment Ethical Responsiblity (Score 1) 502
While the Lori Drew verdict was about legal responsiblity, there is a difference between legal and ethical responsiblity. Ethically, Lori Drew is responsible for a girl taking her own life. If somebody in that house didn't feel ethically responsible, they wouldn't have bothered covering it up.
We can do very little legally to protect our children from this kind of thing. That's just the way it is.
Comment Scientists as Consumers? (Score 1) 154
One issue brought up in the article is scientists don't know the value of the information they produce. The pieces of information created by scientists can't be divided up into portions of equal value because what is valuable to one scientist is going to be based upon their field of interest and research. The problem is that your "consumer audience" isn't a single market of half a million scientists, it's half a million markets that happen to be made up of scientists.
Could Open Source Lead to a Meritocratic Search Engine? 148
Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "When Jimmy Wales recently announced the
Search Wikia
project,
an attempt to build an open-source search engine around the user-driven
model
that gave birth to Wikipedia, he said
his goal was to create
"the search engine that changes everything", as he underscored in a
February
5 talk
at New York University. I think it could, although not for the same main
reasons that
Wales has put forth -- I think that for a search engine to be truly
meritocratic would be more of
a revolution than for a search engine to be open-source, although both
would be large steps
forward. Indeed, if a search engine
could be built that really returned results in order of average
desirability
to users, and resisted efforts by companies to "game" the system (even if
everyone knew precisely how the
ranking algorithm worked),
it's hard to overstate how much that would change things both for
businesses and consumers. The key question is whether such an algorithm
could
be created that wouldn't be vulnerable to non-merit-based manipulation.
Regardless of what algorithms may be currently under consideration by
thinkers within
the Wikia company, I want to argue logically for some necessary
properties that such an algorithm should have in order to be effective.
Because if their search engine becomes popular, they will face such huge
efforts
from companies trying to manipulate the search results, that it will make
Wikipedia
vandalism look like a cakewalk." The rest of his essay follows.
Journal Journal: CNN's Barbara Starr: Iran's Judith Miller! 28
So Atrios and ThinkProgress and others are up in arms because CNN is reporting that there is intelligence tying weapons used against U.S. troops to Iran's supreme leader.
Submission + - TSA can't figure out security certificates
markgo2k writes: "The Washington Post reports that TSA has taken a new website live that people who are wrongly on the famous "no-fly" list can protest their status. Unbelievably, the website uses a self-signed certificate (and some have reported that you can submit forms insecurely as well). Perhaps contractor (Desyne Web Services, Inc. www.desyne.com) nor whoever was managing them ever actually tested the site or figured that flashing red certificate error warnings were something that might not be okay on a site that asks for name, address, height, weight, date of birth, hair color, eye color, passport number, birth certificate, drivers license number, military id number..."
Submission + - Why is the RIAA against music download services?
GuyverDH writes: I've been sitting here scratching my head, trying to come up with a reason beyond greed as to why the RIAA is against download services, whether they be pay services or non pay services.
As I tried to sift through information, it suddenly came to me. I think I know the reason they do not like download services. It (the non DRM'd download services) is not defective by design. Let me re-state this. The original download services did not have DRM. They didn't care about piracy, they cared about defective by design. DRM free downloads can be copied off to backup media, and re-used on just about any platform. Essentially the user would NEVER have to buy another copy of that music again. This, in my opinion, is the real reason the RIAA is against this.
Let's look at the history of the music industry.
One of the first commercially available music formats was the vynil album. It had the built in defect that the media was easily damaged. Small scratches were enough to make the media unusable.
Next we had tape — reel to reel, 8-track, cassette, DAT. All of these had the inherit defect that they were easily damaged. The tape was easily mangled or erased, either by dirty heads (as the tape dumped magnetic residue onto the heads), or because of different speed reels or other components that the tape was routed through.
Next we had optical media — Compact Disc, Music DVDs. These were probably the most defective media ever created or adopted by the RIAA. Why? Because something as simple as a fingerprint is enough to cause the media to fail (at least until it's cleaned). The act of cleaning the disc, if not done properly, is enough to permanently damage it.
Finally, the digital file format, DRM free. P2P file sharing services were the anti-defective by design. Not only were the files DRM free, but they were in formats that just about anyone could read. There is also the fact that simple replication to additional media (backup tapes, discs, other hard drives, flash media, etc...) gave the end-user the ability to re-create any failed media without re-purchasing the music.
Every one of these media formats were designed with a built in defect. They were designed to fail during normal use. They were designed to fail in a way that we'd blame the media not the industry that used the media. They were designed to fail to increase their revenue streams through re-purchasing music due to media failure.
Guess what? We fell for it.
This, I believe, is the reason the RIAA is against DRM free digital music distribution.
It's not about pirating. It's about lost revenue due to the fact that people aren't having to re-purchase music over and over and over and over again due to (surprise) failed defective by design media.
Give it some thought. Maybe I've gone over the deep end, but I truly think this may be the root cause.
As I tried to sift through information, it suddenly came to me. I think I know the reason they do not like download services. It (the non DRM'd download services) is not defective by design. Let me re-state this. The original download services did not have DRM. They didn't care about piracy, they cared about defective by design. DRM free downloads can be copied off to backup media, and re-used on just about any platform. Essentially the user would NEVER have to buy another copy of that music again. This, in my opinion, is the real reason the RIAA is against this.
Let's look at the history of the music industry.
One of the first commercially available music formats was the vynil album. It had the built in defect that the media was easily damaged. Small scratches were enough to make the media unusable.
Next we had tape — reel to reel, 8-track, cassette, DAT. All of these had the inherit defect that they were easily damaged. The tape was easily mangled or erased, either by dirty heads (as the tape dumped magnetic residue onto the heads), or because of different speed reels or other components that the tape was routed through.
Next we had optical media — Compact Disc, Music DVDs. These were probably the most defective media ever created or adopted by the RIAA. Why? Because something as simple as a fingerprint is enough to cause the media to fail (at least until it's cleaned). The act of cleaning the disc, if not done properly, is enough to permanently damage it.
Finally, the digital file format, DRM free. P2P file sharing services were the anti-defective by design. Not only were the files DRM free, but they were in formats that just about anyone could read. There is also the fact that simple replication to additional media (backup tapes, discs, other hard drives, flash media, etc...) gave the end-user the ability to re-create any failed media without re-purchasing the music.
Every one of these media formats were designed with a built in defect. They were designed to fail during normal use. They were designed to fail in a way that we'd blame the media not the industry that used the media. They were designed to fail to increase their revenue streams through re-purchasing music due to media failure.
Guess what? We fell for it.
This, I believe, is the reason the RIAA is against DRM free digital music distribution.
It's not about pirating. It's about lost revenue due to the fact that people aren't having to re-purchase music over and over and over and over again due to (surprise) failed defective by design media.
Give it some thought. Maybe I've gone over the deep end, but I truly think this may be the root cause.
