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Comment Re:Did I miss something? (Score 1) 295

under current British rule, I'm not so sure it would actually be all that different today.

No matter how much you personally disagree with the policies of Her Majesty's Government, at least the officials who run it were duly elected by their constituents.

China does not have real elections (in that you have a choice of more than one party to vote for).

Please don't try to compare the UK with China.

Comment No reason to move them to the right, either! (Score 1) 641

It was Windows NT or 95 that decided randomly to move the close box to the right side (3.1 had only the window menu for closing, and you had to double-click it or drop it down and click "close"). The only reason I can imagine why they did that was a juvenile attempt to differentiate vs. classic Mac OS. See also:

- Icons lined up by default on the left of the desktop instead of right.
- White mouse arrow (stupid!) instead of black
- global "bar" (taskbar vs mac menu bar) at the bottom of the screen by default instead of the top

All these changes were so obviously made to be "the opposite of whatever Apple does" in order to give Windows a veneer of different-ness so that the inexperienced user (or judge) would say "Wow, this is definitely NOT a knock-off of Mac OS! In fact, it's the opposite!

Therefore, since the original justification for moving it to the right was nonexistent, none is needed to move it back where it belongs.

Image

Man Threatened Spam Attack In $200,000 Extortion Plot 77

52-year-old Anthony Digati was arrested for trying to extort $200,000 from an insurance firm by threatening to spam them with six million emails unless they paid up. Digati said he would use a spam service and his amazing talents as a "huge social networker" to drag the company "through the muddiest waters imaginable" and presumably unfriend everyone. He added that the price would increase to $3 million if they failed to pay up by Monday, according to federal authorities.
Books

Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked 90

An anonymous reader writes "After a little over five months of pondering, xkcd fans have cracked a puzzle hidden inside Randall Munroe's recent book xkcd: volume 0. Here is the start of the thread on the xkcd forums; and here is the post revealing the final message (a latitude and longitude plus a date and time)."

Comment Re:Free anti-virus with Internet service purchase! (Score 1) 577

Something must be wrong with your computer. I've been using time machine since leopard came out (I never did backups properly until that so this was a big win for me) and other than occasionally spotting the little time machine menubar item doing its little animation, I've NEVER noticed anything.
Also, I get "spinning wheels" only on occasion, always when a program is working on an intensive operation and not responding (usually Textmate doing a project-wide search). This doesn't affect any other programs at the time.

Comment Re:Tivo needs to move to iptv (Score 1) 490

Tivo needs to cut out the middleman, and offer an iptv device. No cable cards, no contracts with satellite providers, just plug it in to your network.

Of course, with cablecos owning major chunks of cable networks and now broadcast networks (NBC), they would never allow an IPTV startup to carry any halfway-complete set of channels... And with no net neutrality, our monopoly cable and phone companies that both want to sell you their TV services can throttle back "Tivo IP" to about 10Kbps... Crap.

Comment Re:Lousy marketing? (Score 1) 490

(only record new, but the satellite picks up locals and shows them on 3 feeds [HD, local channel number, and 8000 channel number] so the DVR records the new episode on all three feeds because it's my highest ranked show).

You're doing it wrong on the Dish box. I think you made a Dish Pass when what you want is a plain vanilla recording. Dish pass searches on every channel--it may be good for catching the next time your favorite movie comes on, or if you gotta have every "Cops" that's aired in syndication, but a normal recording is always the tool for recording first-run shows because a normal recording only does the channel you put it on. Since you know new episodes of Big Bang Theory will always be on CBS, you just find it in the guide on your HD CBS channel, press "Record," hit "new episodes," and you're done. You'll get only new episodes that air on that specific channel.

Also cool is the timeslot feature. That is another choice in the standard recording creator, where it records that show *if and only if* it is on in that same timeslot. If it's preempted nothing is recorded. If they air episodes at 5, 6, and 10, you'll only get the timeslot you intended.

Also the Dish thing does group by show name, it's one of the options to the right of the list. Let me know if you can't find it and i'll go see what it's called. It also lets you sort either by most recently recorded or alpha.

The biggest annoyance I have with Dish DVR is that they don't strip off "The" from the beginning of shows when alphabetizing. So i have a huge "The" section down near the end of the alpha list. Aside from that it's awesome. and now the web scheduling is out of beta so i can log in and edit scheduled recording, delete shows etc. from anywhere.

Comment Re:how is this different (Score 1) 406

FYI, you can get those blackberry trackballs for about $3-4 on Amazon. One search there ought to yield you about 50 different places selling them. The "replacement" requires a small spoon or anything to pry off the little ring and the ball mechanism lifts right out. It takes about 30 seconds. You should do it, your thumb will thank you. I picked up about 8 of them to keep 'em on hand for various coworkers, it saved on the shipping.

If only the apple mighty mouse had been designed smartly enough to have that little trackball be an easy replacement instead of being impossible to replace... :D

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