Comment Bait and switch. (Score 3, Insightful) 246
Yup, bait and switch. "We're all warm and fluffy with open source, we're a safe alternative to java, honest, look." *sigh*
Comment Re:It's not ending... (Score 1) 549
TV out and a bluetooth keyboard/mouse. You'll take your tablet/handset everywhere with you. Yes, open plan offices with brainstorming sessions on couches, fuck it, we'll throw in some group therapy once a week. Online apps/remotely hosted apps are going to dominate, E-Mail sold the internet, now everyone* uses web mail. The dumb terminal is not so long ago, is it? Of course will this always with you tablet-thingy dominate all computing needs? Of course not, as no one platform ever has but it really is coming to this.
*For some value of everyone.
*For some value of everyone.
Comment Re:ATTN: MAC USERS (Score 1) 549
If you think personal computers are no longer necessary, interesting, or are part of a dying industry, turn in your geek card at the door as you GTFO.
And this year is the year of the Linux desktop, right? Do you see what I did there? Yeah man, the PC market is in decline, mobile devices and on-line apps are the way ahead for the 'normals' (I'm not one either). The big black whirry box will soon be a distant memory for most people, they don't need 10k MIPS per core, they don't know they don't need it and the don't want to know. So long as they can tweet, update facebook, listen to tunes and watch youtube they don't care. You probably know all this, or I hope you do.
Comment ESO press release (Score 1) 82
"A magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck central Chile at 03:34 local time (07:34 CET) on Saturday 27 February 2010. The epicentre was 115 km north-northeast of the city of Concepción and 325 km south-west of the capital Santiago. The earthquake has caused significant casualties and damage in the country.
ESO expresses its deepest condolences to the families of the victims, and its sympathy and support for all those affected by the earthquake.
No casualties among ESO staff have been reported. At present, power cuts and network interruptions mean that communication may be limited. Disruption to staff travel plans within, to, and from Chile should be expected. We urge Visiting Astronomers with observations planned at ESO observatories to put their trips to Chile on hold until further notice. International flights to and from Santiago International Airport are currently either cancelled or diverted. Information about observing programmes will be provided at a later date.
Despite being the 7th strongest earthquake ever recorded worldwide, the ESO observatory sites did not suffer any damage, partly as they are engineered to withstand seismic activity and partly due to their distances from the epicentre. At La Silla, a power cut caused observations to stop during the night. Paranal Observatory, the APEX telescope and the ALMA Operations Support Facility and Array Operations Site were unaffected."
A 7.8 quake struck Antofagasta (120km north of the telescope site) in 1995 (http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso9517/).
Various other quakes in the area : http://www.eso.org/gen-fac/pubs/astclim/earthquake/his-paranal-58.html (Historic times to 2000.)
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/epic/epic_circ.php allows you to get at historical quakes map up to 1994 ; 1973 to present and various other formats ; there has been plenty of data for planning quake likelihoods and the engineering responses that would be required.
Comment Re:Maybe they need to set their priorities (Score 2, Insightful) 452
Oh, you meant that you want to keep downloading stuff for free, just that you want to be immune from negative consequences?
Uhh nnooo I think he said: people who want to see dramatic copyright reform
The "respect" for copyright requires copyright in good faith. If that trust is broken, I have no respect for the law - and neither should you.
Now I think someone could, maybe should, start a campaign of publicized copyright infringement. One person won't do it, but hundreds, or thousands, offering themselves up for arrest would start to make waves.
I don't know, I've been thinking about the best way to do it for a while now. I don't know if we have the luxury of waiting much longer.
Comment Re:Who are the denailists? (Score 1) 572
Your continuing guesswork is close.
I'm actually one of the ones who has an ulcer with an unknown cause, I take pantoprazole every day and I'm fine.
I was diagnosed using the standard urea breath test, which is around 97% accurate.
I have no A. Pylori, but if I did, I would be off the meds right now, instead having to take them indefinitely.
Comment Re:Human memory = low quality copy (Score 1) 1218
*chuckle* thnks for that, I did forget to mention that I won't upload ripped movies from DVD rentals, just an ongoing moral problem for me. Redistributing copyright material that cost a lot of money to make in the first place is something that I can see as wrong, but my own counter-argument tells me that paying Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Cruise and the like $10million a movie is also morally wrong and I don't want to support that model of business either ...
Microsoft Withdraws Vista's Kill Switch 635
l-ascorbic writes "In what they are calling a change of tactics, Microsoft has removed the controversial 'kill switch' from Vista in SP1. This feature is designed to disable pirated copies of the OS, but had led to numerous reports of it disabling legitimate copies. It will be replaced with a notice that repeatedly informs the user that their OS is pirated. '[Microsoft corporate vice president Mike Sievert] added: "It's worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy has not changed. All copies of Windows Vista still require activation and the system will continue to validate from time to time to verify that systems are activated properly." Microsoft said it had pursued legal action against more than 1,000 dealers of counterfeit Microsoft products in the last year and taken down more than 50,000 "illegal and improper" online software auctions.'"
How Best Buy Tried To Whip The Geek Squad Into Shape 476
The Consumerist site is featuring a follow-up to their Geek Squad porn collectors story, a feature we discussed back in July. According to Consumerist, Best Buy set up their own rigorous internal investigation to catch the culprits soon after these revelations became public. At that point, of course, employee morale went out the window. Draconian interrogation methods were apparently used, and innocent employees lost their jobs. "There were three Geek Squad members fired from my store including myself. The first two were fired for burning a non-copyrighted CD for another employee on a non company issued blank CD-R. I admitted in my interrogation that I was aware of this, and that I stopped these events after that occurrence. I was fired for being aware of this non copyrighted CD being copied. To quote, I did not provide the proper example of leadership. Keep in my mind I removed over 100 illegal tools and pirated discs upon my arrival as supervisor, as well as some remnants of an internal porn scandal."
Submission + - Music Industry on Last Legs says Exec
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "For years, the major record labels have fought a pitched battle against the MP3 format and although major labels like EMI and the Universal Music Group have embraced the MP3 format in recent months, a story from the Mercury News says early returns from those moves indicate they've had little impact on the industry's fortunes — for better or for worse. "These are ailing businesses on their last legs," said Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, a market research company focused on digital media. The question of copy protection on song downloads "matters a whole lot less to them than it once did." The industry has a bigger problem. Consumers used to buy CDs for $10 or $15 a pop. Increasingly, they're buying songs at about $1 apiece instead. So, even if transactions continue to increase, the industry is seeing far less money each time consumers buy and it's having a difficult time making up the difference. By potentially encouraging more music sales, moving to MP3s may be one piece of the answer to the industry's problem but it's not the only one. Instead, the industry's going to have to explore other ideas, including advertising-supported music, promotional relationships and subscriptions."
Submission + - Everything you've read about Vista DRM is lies (zdnet.com) 2
Technical Writing Geek writes: "Self-described "professional paranoid" Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland has become the most widely quoted source of information on DRM and content protection in Windows Vista. The trouble is, Gutmann's work is riddled with factual errors, distortions, contradictions, and outright untruths, and his conclusions are equally wrong.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=299"
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=299"
Slashdot Top Deals
The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.
