Posts by RK 28 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2007
i hear ASUS has quite the nice sound card out nowadays. i've been 100% satisfied with their mobos for years, so i think i'll be giving them a try next time i drop some $$$ on a sound card upgrade.
you'd think that these corporate asshats would learn at some point that their customers are the reason they stay in business, especially a company that's struggling to remain relevant and riding (mostly) on it's reputation, and encourage people to be more involved in this type of thing. (nVidia and ATI both have communities of people who tweak their drivers for specific ends.) if they simply took this as a sign of the demand and got their shit together to FIX the drivers, people would likely re-install the Creative ones and there would be no loss of goodwill. instead, they treat customers like criminals and pull out the "stealing IP" card (one that's worked SO well in other situations for other companies) and end up being seen as the money-grubbing hacks they've become.
profit > customer goodwill is a losing equation. just ask Micro$uck.
because all they care about marketing it to vapid Americans who have little appreciation for any culture outside their own (did i say "vapid" already?)...and it has to make money above all else.
if you aren't seeing the general trend by now, you'd better wake up and get used to one classic film/book/TV series after another being "remade" into a lame star-vehicle, until they've done them ALL, then they'll start on round 2 (3?) in 2020 with "The New, NEW Scooby-Doo" or some such crap. originality rarely figures into "guaranteed profits".
best thing is to ignore them entirely and certainly not to give them any money for such trash.
it's just a few vocal Puritans who make a ridiculous stink about them...and so happen to be ones who have enough power/influence to get shown in the media making said stink.
most of us have no problems with it, and at work it's only an issue of "professionalism" and whatnot, which i don't see as unreasonable. (luckily my office doesn't have any windows ;D)
i have the feeling you Brits have the same basic dilemma as we 'Murrikans...old guard vs. new school (Mary Whitehouse, haha, charade you are). the sooner the prudes are in their graves, the better off we'll all be.
meanwhile, i just watched the original 'Wicker Man' not too long ago. it was really quite comical and not the least bit horrific, but nonetheless better than 80% of movies made today. i found myself rooting for the pagans, who are a good deal more fun than those damn Christian stiffs (who are owed some flaming payback, as far as i'm concerned). the booty shots were nice, but nothing to write home about.
and Paris because...well, anything arse related should probably fall under her demure gaze, no?
that obfuscate the real picture here: in 4 months Apple has jumped ahead of ALL BUT TWO phone manufacturers in sales (including ALL Windows Mobile devices). those companies have both been doing ONE thing (primarily) for MANY YEARS...making phones.
apple haters can whine all they want about how "it's not a smartphone" or "it's just eye candy that isn't a REAL phone" or the other excuses they use to downplay the true success that Apple represents time and time again: they make technology elegant, simple to use, and fun, and in doing so inspire the kind of loyalty that is envied by pretty much every other company. if Microsoft was doing these same things with the same tech, people would fall all over themselves to sing their praises and gush like schoolgirls
as for this persistent stereotype of "arrogant, smug" Mac users...i know many Mac users (most of whom have used Windows enough to make fair comparisons between the two operating systems) and NOT ONE of them fits this description. most of them are not techies and they look at their computers as tools to accomplish tasks, and they don't think they should have to understand the technical side just to be able to get things done with their computers (or keep them free of malware). in this respect Apple's products like the Mac OS are simple to learn and use. these people aren't any less worthy than someone who has the technical understanding; the majority of geeks don't have a clue how their car works but they aren't calling each other names because of this ignorance.
i would recommend the Apple-bashers find people with iPhones and ask them how they like them, how easy it is to learn to use it and if they utilize most of the features available, and base their opinions on the iPhone on that evidence instead of simply spewing out vitriol about Apple based on existing prejudice, or coming up with false arguments like "it's not a SMARTphone" (like that means anything to anyone but marketers). i don't expect you to suddenly love Apple or buy their stuff or anything else, obviously, but i think you'll find that a vast majority of Mac and iPhone users LOVE them and wouldn't go back for anything.
wait...that would require an objectivity that tech geeks seem to be nearly completely lacking (to engage in a bit of stereotyping of my own).
for the record, i'm a Windows Server admin who uses Windows (XP) on both machines at home, and who also has two Macs and has used and administered both OS's for years. i don't own an iPhone and likely won't for the foreseeable future, mostly because i don't need a phone that does more than make calls.
so you know there's an easy solution for your impending disillusionment with Apple and Jobs "leaving his senses" with the MBA release: don't buy one.
if you were an investor in Apple, i could understand your concern, but as simply someone who's come round to seeing positives about using Macs (as opposed to frothing at the mouth and spewing vitriol about them simply because they're made by Apple), you really can just ignore the MBA and go about your business as if nothing has changed. it's not as if they're dropping the Macbook or MB Pro lines in favor of this.
please let this be only a rumor. i don't care if Microsuck does make some decent hardware, their record of buying or partnering with companies and then destroying their product quality is enough for me to fear what they will do to Logitech if they buy it. i'll agree that some of the M$ keyboards and mice are pretty good (battery life was terrible in the one wireless combo i had, but they felt nice to use), but there will remain no incentive for them to maintain high standards if they buy out their only real competition.
it seems they can't stand ANY competition in any market because it shows them up to be the second-rate manufacturer that they are. there needs to be a strong competitor to leverage quality and brand-name recognition against the sheer size of the M$ juggernaut. (reference Intel vs. AMD wars for comparison.)
plus, i HATE giving those bastards any money. if this is true, i'm buying a spare G11 keyboard and some extra MX518 & G5 mice to sock away for the day my current ones die.
i lived in Tucson for a couple of years...there are some stunningly beautiful women there (all that sun and warm weather), partly due to the large University. they are one thing i miss about living there, besides being warm all the time.
this person is not one of them, though at some point she must have been if she was 2-time beauty pageant queen. if the calendar shot is any indication, she's gone pretty far downhill in the meantime. (i'll bet it was drug-related, there's lots of meth in the US these days - her behaviour is classic meth-freak overkill).
since she was on-track to be an "entertainment lawyer," i'd say there's a bright future ahead for her (post-prison) in the "copyright enforcement" division of the RIAA. she certainly has the requisite callousness and vigilante mentality.
"given that Israel is a nation that protects human rights..."
unless you're Palestinian...but hey, they're not humans, right?
my question is...were the charges simply baseless or are the plaintiffs up to shady dealings, and they're using the courts to silence someone who's onto them? interestingly, no mention of this aspect, only "bloggerous slander".
i hereby declare the invention of a new word (by me): "bloggerous". TM, circle R, circle C, etc., etc.
actually, your assertion that NO ONE voted against the resolution giving Dubya the "de facto" authorization to invade Iraq is INCORRECT. Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland, CA voted 'NO' on the resolution, and was the only one for quite a while to consistently vote against our Little Caesar and his hypocritical, corrupt cronies controlling Congress at the time. Dennis Kucinich eventually came round as well, and now that the Democrats aren't QUITE as afraid as they were for 3 years after 9/11, more of them are standing up to the crooks, but only in matters that sidestep any opportunity for Rethuglicans to call them "weak" or "soft" or "flippy-floppy" or whatever the groupthink term of the week is.
but, that aside, those of you asserting there should be more judges like this and that he is "God" in his courtroom and that sort of NONSENSE all seem to be enamored of this idea that authority derives from itself or "rightness" or whatever, rather than from people, which is contrary to the fundamental principles of the the Magna Carta and U.S. Constitution (as well as those of other countries) and the basic beliefs that underlie it, like "the rule of law". it's sad to me that people continue to romanticize the idea of power for its own sake and wanton misuse of it to deprive people of their rights, because you underline the fact that we've learned little from all the bloodshed, cruelty, wasted lives, and wasted resources our history.
stop for a bit and consider how this man interrupted peoples' lives. some of them undoubtedly had children they couldn't attend to or perhaps meetings or other committments for work that they couldn't keep. there were probably financial impacts for these people (even simple things like parking fines and the like) -- through no fault of their own and all because some judge let being "God" in his courtroom go to his head.
i don't like cellphones all that much either, but there's a lot of leeway in deciding how to deal with a situation like this (perhaps the person simply FORGOT to turn it off) that don't involve taking it to an extreme like this.
no one ever seems to prosecute religious fanatic freaks for persecuting others (except for the occasional abortion-clinic bomber).
this kind of story (along with sad tales of the imminent extinction of wild tigers) has a lot to do with why i've essentially given up on humanity as a hopelessly backward species that will eventually do itself (and huge numbers of other lifeforms) in through a mix of cleverness and gullibility. what's really sad about it is that the numbers of the brainwashed religious fanatics in my country (Amerikkka) are growing faster than the counterbalancing numbers of open-minded fanatics, trending us inevitably towards a new dark-age.
TEH DOOMSAYER HAS SPOKEN!
thank you, time for a nap.
is if they are updating the Crosshair with a newer chipset to support AM2+? and for that matter, is nvidia working on a newer AMD chipset to replace the aging 590i? i've been holding out for a Crosshair board with Socket AM2+, but i want something with a newer chipset rather than just a BIOS update to support the new chips.
i'm reluctant to go with teh AMD chipset until i've heard a lot more about its performance. as it stands the current Crosshair is a pretty awesome board, but it's sporting >1 year old tech and i've gotta wonder if the current chipset is going to bottleneck future upgrades.
Paris, which would you choose?
"Fortunately for Mac owners there is a very simple way around this vicious and devastating attack.
Simply install a program called Boot Cap.
Boot Cap is very clever because it literally Boots out the security plagued OSX operating system and places a Cap over it -- Windows!
From then on you can enjoy stable, secure, efficient, beautiful, innovative, cool, fast, compatible and cost effective Vista like the rest of the grown ups in the world of computing."
let's see...use OS/X which costs $129 and is susceptible to one (1) (count em...>1<) virus if the user is dumb enough to play along far enough to actually get it installed...
OR
install M$ Vista, which costs a MINIMUM of $199 for the crap low-end version, and become susceptible to 73,743 (that's >seventy-three THOUSAND<) viruses, according to the "Daily Updates" section of http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response/index.jsp, many of which will install *themselves* if i just leave the firewall off.
idk, maybe i'm a "fanboi" but honestly, it just amazes me that any Micro$uck supporter would have the nerve to claim that XP or Vista is a better value than OS X. try moving forward in time from 1995 to the present era.
that we don't have public humiliation punishments anymore. i'm thinking locked in stocks in the middle of Liverpool every weekend is a very fitting punishment for this type of behavior, because it turns it back round on him and puts him on the receiving end. you can't outright torture people for this kind of thing (i.e. no blowtorches or castration...come on, it's despicable but that kind of thing is too much for nearly any crime short of really horrifying acts, like torturing little kids or animals for "fun"), but you can teach them a lesson via public humiliation that will likely leave a deep impression and make them think twice about doing this kind of thing again. the idea is to create a deterrent -- to condition them to stop before they engage and recall the unpleasant consequences of previous maldeeds.
i think a great deal of selfish, idiotic behavior would be curbed if society returned to the use of public humiliation. this guy would be a perfect test subject.
"A question for all you Shatner haters. What is it about your own lives that is so horrible that you need to hate a 70+ year old Canadian actor so much? I mean, what do any of you know about him as a person, or his life? How many of you have walked an inch in his shoes, never mind a mile?"
Well, for me it was "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," but i think the real nail in the coffin was Msr. Montalban blowing Shatner out of the water in "The Wrath of Khan" (far and away the best ST movie). It really was sad how bad Shatner looked contrasted with R.M., scene to scene.
Then Picard came along and showed us how a *real* actor captains the Starship Enterprise. No flings with alien floozies for him, no sir! He was a military man, through and through, with Shakespearean diction, to boot! Even if No. 1 was generally stiff and Wesley Crusher inspired a desire to have his head crushed mercilessly in an airlock door, Picard kept us (me) coming back, week after week. (and Troi's very large....er, hair.)
While i would agree that Shatner has done a lot to promote science fiction over the years (books and bad movies and the original series), let's face it, he's a terrible actor, and the only original cast member who pulls in the viewers is Leonard Nimoy, period. (willfully forgetting his stab at the Top 40, back in the day, of course. *wink wink*)
bring me around again to my conclusion that the core problem here isn't profit or arrogance or customer service or Linux/Mac/Windows (each of which have their strengths and weaknesses), but that the very nature of hardware/software development and, tbh, the fundamental nature of capitalism, is that leaving well-enough alone IS NOT acceptable.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a phrase nearly everyone knows and nearly everyone agrees with, yet we have example after example of engineers, developers, what-have-you, that have to come up with the "new bigger better thing" that simply gobs up what already works pretty well. my theory is that this very thing is built into capitalism ("limitless growth") and all the rest just cascades down from there, mostly because all these companies are driven by the imperative to make more money than they did the previous quarter(s). couple that with marketing principles that insist on "new and improved" because they are convinced that people have to perceive something as "new and improved" (whether or not it really is) in order to be convinced to buy what they (often) don't need, and you've created "planned obsolescence" and forced people into that cycle, whether it's good for them or not. obviously there's examples where that was the best course of action, but there's plenty of examples where it was only best for the bottom line of the manufacturer (or appeared to be at the time), and the customers are left to pick up the pieces.
that a certain collection of documents ranging in age from 2-3 thousand years old, cobbled together from a number of cultures' mythologies, and translated several times from one language to another (with the attendant signal-to-noise ratio), is waved about as "the word of God" by an althogether disturbing number of people and used (frequently out-of-context) to justify many repugnant behaviors and prejudices.
"To be fair to Edison, the elephant he electrocuted was done as a form of safety demonstration, and she had killed 3 keepers so far..."
i expect you probably wouldn't much like being caged, either...
@ron beck
you might want to read up on one Nikola Tesla, who was the primary advocate of DC power, and who demonstrated some intriguing solutions to the distance-transmission problems. unfortunately, due to a number of factors (including Edison's ruthless and deceptive smear campaign involving the aforementioned elephant "electrocution", as well as Tesla's strong bent towards invention and not entrepreneurship), he was never able to capitalize on or patent those particular inventions and they appear to be lost to history...
look at the demand side of things and start encouraging or (gasp!) *mandating* that individuals and businesses start adjusting their lifestyles to use less energy, but that would bring all the ostriches' heads up out of the sand to start howling about "socialism" and "communism" and "liberalism" and "manifest destiny" and "god-given rights to live however we please and fuck the planet and non-human species," etc., etc.
better to let gov'ts continue to hem and haw and sign treaties and talk about the "need for more conclusive research" and all that, then we can all blame them for not bothering to do anything about it soon enough and letting us run amok when clearly we are hell-bent on shitting in our own beds and then crying about having to lie in them.
having a field day lately, wagging their fingers and going on about how terrible "stealing" digital media is and how righteous the RIAA, MPAA, IFPI et al., are and what terrible people these "thieves" are and how they deserve any ridiculous punishment they get for their evil-doer misdeeds....like, oh, i don't know, maybe...a $220,000 fine for >>24<< (crappy) songs. (Journey? she got fined $10k for a JOURNEY song?! now that's cruel and/or unusual punishment.)
but the thing is, the higher they climb up on their high horses and preach about how we're gonna burn in hell and pay lotsa dough and suffer spam- and virus-ridden PCs because we choose the dark side to get our digital jollies instead of ponying up hard-earned cash for overpriced CDs & downloads, the more pirates like to bellow "YAAAARRR!!!" and skewer the prigs with a curved blade whilst bludgeoning them about the head with a fistful of charred meat, or perhaps a mug of some fine stout (or grog or whatever alcoholic beverage you happen to have stocked belowdecks).
you'd think they'd learn, but i guess some people just have no fun unless they are busy trying to foist their views of right and wrong on everyone else.
personally, i cheer every time TPB or Media-Defender Defenders and the like return fire with a more clever and cheeky turn to these arrogant bastards! they NEED to be taken down a few notches.
' He added that scientific consensus held that that kind of sea level rise would be possible if Greenland's ice melted, but that that melt would happen "after, and over, millennia" '
er, "scientific consensus" recently re-consensed to the opinion that their models were inadequate and that ice-cap melting was happening much faster than they had forseen. thus, it stands to reason that the aforementioned "consensus" opinion is also incorrect, thus throwing the basis of the judge's assertion into doubt.
but hey, it makes for good headlines, since we all know that global warming is simply a leftist commie feminist scare-tactic to try to force us to change our lifestyles into something a bit more ecologically sound. god forbid.
@ D Berkeley
what?! your cops have guns?! i thought they just clubbed everything to death!
you better hope they aren't watching too many reruns of US cop shows, or they'll be out trying to prove their "manliness" by wantonly shooting by-standers and those of non-white persuasion, then being exonerated by courts who are afraid to "set a precedent" that might "udermine citizens' faith in law enforcement."
this boils down to (once again) the fact that as far as M$ is concerned, Windows on YOUR machine is not yours, it's THEIRS, and it will always be theirs, regardless of how much money you forked over to them for it, and they think they can do whatever they want to modify it when they feel it's "necessary".
so, justifying a statement like "pushing an update that was necessary for the continued smooth running of Windows Update and then gripe when the update gets undone by a repair disk" requires proving that the update is "necessary...for the continued smooth running of Windows Update," which frankly i don't believe.
there had to have been other ways to approach this, and it's a bit hard to understand how this got pushed out to the general public without any TESTING on their end that would have determined that this problem arose after the installation. the fault lies with M$ for pulling this kind of crap and then leaving it up to the end-user to deal with it.
they're never going to learn, they really don't care about us except for the money that's in our (virtual) pockets, and as long as you are a windows user, you might as well expect this.
do what i do and turn off automatic updates for your computers. use the WU site and "custom" option, after reading about what the various updates do, and choose the ones that actually seem to be relevant to the functionality of your windows machine(s). and if you are a sysadmin, use WSUS and insert yourself as a valve between M$ and your workstations to minimize the possibility of this kind of thing, since they continue to abuse the trust that people place in them by dint of using Windows (a choice many of us don't have much choice in, unfortunately).
that's too bad, "Donkey Server No. 6" was my server of choice, followed by "No. 2". i'm surprised it took them this long to shut them down, but there's probably 60 more servers in the list. most of my stuff comes down via Kad anyway, so i doubt it will slow things down for long.
my manager is old-school, which makes it hard to convince him of the need for pro-active security considerations. for most of his career, there really wasn't much need for it, so there must not be today. the main obstacle, though, really is that we haven't had any major problems -- so far -- "it's working fine, what need is there to spend money to fix a problem that isn't there? if they can't get through the firewall, we have nothing to worry about."
it's the insurance argument i always heard from my parents, all over again: "if you need it you'll wish you had it!"
i could do pretty much whatever i needed to secure things if it didn't cost anything to implement (other than my pay), but the second it starts taking money to make things happen, there's "no need for it."
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