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Don't be dense. The comments are owned by the poster, meaning Slashdot has no control over what gets posted, and no responsibility. But this is also a public forum, available to anyone, so anyone can reproduce those comments. I don't get why so many people bitch about comments being reprinted without permission--there are too many people, and too many AC's to make that possible; and this is a public forum. It's not like you're publishing a book.

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Not really, I think. The more powerful Microsoft becomes, the more control they'll have over everything. Not as much as a government, but plenty. And if nobody stands up to them when them want something on the net censored, they'll get real used to the idea. Roblimo's right, it would be a very dangerous precedent.

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Whoever said that? It is, however, yet another good reason why Linux could be an attractive alternative.

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Be that as it may--how many people smart enough to run a shell script in UNIX do you think will run it without at least glancing at the source?

If you raised your hand to that question, I have a couple of things for you to do:

• Write the letter "L" on your forehead in indullible ink, and
• Switch to using something you can't fsck-up, like BeOS.

The guy's point was, you could conceivably do something like this, but it would require a lot more thought of the part of the unsuspecting user in order for the virus to replicate.

And if he had chosen to write this is ActiveX instead of VB, he could have conceivably had this thing replicate just by viewing the email. Now, that's just stupidity on Microsoft's part. No wonder so many people think of Outlook as "LookOut!" :)

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Junkbuster does cookies marvelously. Ads I'm not so sure--it does a fine job of blocking them out, but I have yet to figure out how to enable them for sites like Slashdot where I have actually clicked through a few. Anyway, if you're interested in such a thing, it's worth checking out.

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yes, for one song. but multiply that by the number of songs on the disc, multiplied by how many discs you want to rip, and Napster becomes more desireable if you have a fast connection.

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'purchased'? *slap* :)

search for it on freshmeat. It runs on Windows and Linux, and filters out any banner ads and cookies you don't want. It is pretty damn cool. Just wish it would work with Mozilla...

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I honestly don't understand what's so cool about Word 2000. I recently tried to format my resume with it, and ended up spending more time cussing at it and fighting with it than actually typing. I tried to indent one line, and it indents the entire paragraph. I try to indent a line one more field, and it goes back to the beginning of the line. Honestly! Just do what I fscking tell you to. Not to mention installing the damn thing is like reinstalling the OS, and I'm not even going to bring up Clippy.

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This is a very good attitude to have. Open source does not automatically make a program good, and if there's a binary-only version that works better, then you'd be better off using it most times. Not always, but most times. I go with open source when i can, and if there's a choice between two nearly identical applications, one open one not, I'll choose the open source one. But, for some things OSS simply isn't there yet, and there's nothing wrong with using a closed source app in that situation.

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No, the previous poster is right. Even if Windows was completely Open Sourced, it could not be fixed. It's a bad design from the ground up, and not worth our time. The only benefit from opening the source would be the opportunity to glean every last proprietary protocol and API from the source for use in Linux or any other OSS operating system.

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It's not a case of pure and simple theft. It is by it's very definition not theft at all, simply copyright infringement. Get it straight, because they are completely different things. It isn't even really possible to steal something online. It's still wrong, but hey, we don't go around mistaking misdemeanors for felonies, do we?

And secondly, I don't feal a bit sorry for the Recording Companies, not because they're rich and I think they can afford it, but because they brought it on themselves. Their first response to any new technology is not to take advantage of the oportunity, but to destroy it. They would be much happier to just stick with their CD cartel if we, their customers, didn't demand more. They will have to be forced into digital media kicking and screaming, and only after they have exhausted themselves trying to get rid of it through pointless court battles that don't really do anything. That's why I support Napster and mp3, and why everyone should. Do you really think they'll give a flip otherwise?

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You know, once flamers have to resort to pointing out spelling mistakes, it just gets really sad.

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"The news of Mozilla's death have been greatly exaggerated." Seriously, where does everyone get off calling Mozilla a failure? It's certainly a bit late, but it's still a bit off from being a failure. Personally, I think Mozilla's great, even now. It's certainly one of the better open source browsers available for Linux, even if it is a bit sluggish. And ever since M15, it hasn't ever really crashed on me yet, and I've been using it for most of my normal browsing.

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That would be no different than lending him the CD... have you ever done that?

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I think a lot of people, yourself included, are missing the point of why Napster is so important. Without Napster, do you honestly think the RIAA would even consider for a minute the idea of online distribution? Napster has forced them to take a long, hard look. I believe Napster has partly came into being because there is such an overwhelming desire for an easy, fast way of getting music online. I would love to be able to buy my favorite songs, one by one, online without paying an extremly inflated price for an entire cd, most of which I may not even want.

The music industry is ignoring this potentially lucrative market for one reason: they have no control over the Internet. And that's what they want, complete and total control of Orwellian proportions over us. If Napster is taken down, it will be replaced very quickly. But not because we all want to be pirates (I believe most people would actually prefer to pay for the songs they listen to) but because the current structure of the music industry is simply too oppressive to bear.

The key is not to attack piracy, becuase piracy will always exist. Music piracy online has existed long before Napster, and will continue to exist afterward. What the music industry needs to do is make buying music easy and fair enough to make piracy not worth the trouble. And I think they will have to give up their position as a cartel in order to acheive this, which is why they probably won't even consider it, sadly.

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Lets not even start with AOL :)

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I'm sure all of us tech support geeks have had our share of winmodem problems. My favorite is when the LT Winmodems decide to play the "IRQ Disco" as I like to call it :) The game is simple: put the modem in, and watch is hop around on different IRQs every time you boot, with no pattern, and never the one that is free... thus pissing off every other component in your computer! This is why you cannot ever trust software to manage your hardware resources. I want manual control, dammit!

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Geeks aren't nearly as statistically insignificant when there's cool technology to be had. We are the early adopters, the people who jump on board new techology before it's popular. Therefore, any portion of the geek population is not a demographic to be ignored, especially not with this. Most of the Windows users will be perfectly happy with their AOL and MSN dialups for some time to come; it is the geeks who are wanting faster connections the most! If Moterola doesn't support Linux and other OS's, we will just have to reverse engineer it and make our own support. It's been done before. And I know most companies don't like the thought of people reverse engineering their stuff, but they'll have brought it on themselves. They don't have to support Linux, but it's not that hard to make it compatible with more than Windows. Basing it on a proprietary solution that only works for a part of the market is not smart business.

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You're right, it would probably be stabler if they had less goals. Personally, I don't think they should have released a prerelease version at all to the public; they're just asking for people to judge it before it's ready.

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I think I'll stick with my beta that works and works fucking sweet - IE 5.5

Oh, so an incremental improvement from an established codebase works better? *gasp* You obviously don't know enough about Mozilla to realize how stupid that post was. Mozilla is a total rewrite of the browser code. It took IE until 4.0 to be decent, and the 4.0 betas blew too. Hey, and since when was this a beta? I don't remember anyone saying beta. Netscape's site only says prerelease too, not beta. I know most Windows trolls wouldn't know anything earlier than beta (since they never see alpha software), so you probably just made an obvious mistake.

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Do I need to point out how buggy Windows 98 Beta, and NT 2000 Betas were?

Oh, god. I actually have a copy of the Windows 2000 betas for Professional, Server and Advanced Server. I tried running Professional... honestly. But it crashed so much for no reason, all the time that it only spent about a week on my machine. Yuck. I'm sure the final versions are better, but I'm not shelling out the cash for it.

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Bah, that's just maintanance. Mozilla is, after all, a rewrite of the browser from scratch, so you can't compare it to IE 5.5... try comparing to the IE 1.0 beta. IE was terrible until 4.0. And from what I've seen of Microsoft software, it's mostly a YMMV situation. I'm sure there's people cussing it out right now.

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Oh yeah, I really miss that feature. Or perhaps just give us the ability to assign functions to other buttons.

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Hey, that's a good idea! If you get enough different lists going, it would be like a mailbomb without using the resources :)

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Hmm, actually Bun-Bun wouldn't be too bad to have around at those times. You need only hand him the phone and say "it's for you" :)

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This is a useless law for two reasons. 1) very few telemarketers actually remove your name anyways (many a time I've been repeatedly harrassed by them even after I've told them several times to take me off their list) and 2) most people aren't nearly annoyed enough by telemarketers to find draining eight hours of their life in court over a pretty insignificant settlement worth it, especially when that's just one telemarketing firm out of hundreds.

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What's even more annoying is people who complain just for the sake of complaining.

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I have my doubts that M$oft.com even runs on IIS because it isn't built to handle high amounts of traffic.

No, I'm sure it uses IIS. You see, you can overcome IIS's shortcomings, it just takes a crapload of redundancy. Microsoft.com is distributed across rows upon countless rows of NT boxes in order to handle the traffic.

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If you're going to rant about somebody not knowing what they're talking about, you'd best read the post carefully lest you come off sounding like an idiot like you just did. Kidlinux didn't say anywhere that there were a million bugs in Windows. In fact, he mentioned the 64,000 bug estimation Microsoft themselves have reported.

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It may be rare to hear about a Linux exploit, but is there really any way of proving it's because of duplicity and not actually less bugs? I realize all code is buggy, OSS code among them. But four years is rediculous, and would never happen in the OSS realm, period.

And if there really was never a back door, then why did they admit there was? I'm sorry, but this seems just as likely to be backpedaling to cover their arse as it could be an honest mistake. And honesty is not something Microsoft is particularily well known for.

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I'm looking forward to see how Apple is going to make out with MacOS X. If it takes off, you have a business model that keeps the OS market alive as a commercial model for the masses and kicks Linux right in it's vulnerable UI guts.

After years of loathing Apple for their rediculously oversimplified OS, I am actually finding myself looking forward to OS X myself. Switching to an open-source UNIX backend is, in my opinion, the smartest thing they could've done. However, I am quite sure it won't do a damn thing to Linux in marketshare--these two OS's are at complete opposite ends of the OS spectrum. Linux is a server OS. Front-end UI improvements are nice for those of us hardcore geeks who demand server performance and utility on a desktop machine (I'm guilty :), but that makes no difference to the market where Linux really shines in--the server market. Putting it down because of a bad UI is comparing Apples to Oranges... er, Apples to Penguins... whatever :)

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The website was made with FrontPage!

If they're advocating cross-platform standards not dominated by Microsoft, wouldn't it be a bit of a faux paux using FrontPage for their website? :)

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Man, you people can not stop slamming Microsoft, can you? You've said in the second paragraph why microsoft treats it's employees so well, something you snidely hinted at in the first paragraph as "they have to"

Well, that's kinda universally true of all companies that employ programmers, though. The demand is so much higher than the supply, that you can't really afford to treat them badly, or else they'll go find a better job quite easily.

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You, sir, are an idiot if you think you can speak for the entire Slashdot community. I use free software because it's better. It's better because it's free, and I don't give a crap what you may think. I don't write code yet, but I'm in the process of learning. And I have every intention of releasing my projetcs under the GPL, because I've seen the good it can do.

As for music, I support musicians not the music industry. I can't in good conscience buy CDs when I know that 95% or more of that goes to a greedy monopolistic company and the real artist gets only pennies from each sale. Therefore, I support independant music, and it's just as good as any of the crap you hear repeated endlessly on the radio. Napster is good for one thing: showing the music industry that we're fed up with their outdated, unfair system and we want a new one. People will pay for music, but not if the producers make it so fricking difficult. We want online distribution, and if they won't give it to us, we'll do it ourselves. All in all, I think Napster has served as a very good wakeup call.

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If it can be proven to stifle free speech, it will be deemed unconstitutional and must be thrown out; I don't care how many congressmen they buy off.

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I think Napster is good, but not in the way you might think. I don't think it's a good thing to be listening to music not not compensating the artist. But Napster is a good thing because it's forcing the industry to actually pay attention to the idea of online distribution. It's obvious they're trying to cling to the old format of hard-copy CD's that they can price gouge at will and pay the artist pennies. But if we were to switch to the Internet for distribution, no one would control it. They could no longer decide who gets recorded and who doesn't. Independant artists would be just as easy to get as popular ones (mp3.com--which is why the RIAA has filed lawsuits against them.) Like so many other big businesses, they won't admit the Internet is the future without being dragged into it kicking and screaming. I, for one, won't miss them.

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Does slashdot deserve a webby? Is it revolutionary in design or concept?

Perhaps not in design, but they have some pretty interesting concepts. Slashdot has the most developed moderation system I've ever seen on a website forum, and the idea of letting the community do the interviews was deffinately a step in the right direction. The interviewing system allows the people to ask questions about things they really care about, and the moderation system works to select the most interesting of questions based on the community as well. Even if it is lazy, it's still pretty revolutionary :)

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Ah, the Parrot Sketch: one of really classic Monty Python sketches. John Cleese is a customer who just bought a parrot at a pet store, and returns to complain that it is dead. The pet store clerk is played by Eric Idle, I think. If I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me. Anyway, he stands there and argues constantly that it is not dead, just resting. It really loses a lot in the translation, you're much better off seeing it for yourself, but that is the gist of it.

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RealPlayer: Requested file not found. The link you followed may be outdated or inaccurate.

Oh well, thanks anyway. Maybe it's been /.'ed

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Well, I think they were pretty stylish looking, especially compared to the pajamas they've got the cast in nowadays.

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Yes, yes, I know it's a decentralized, distributed network and all that. But I'm saying that problem is occuring on every single mp3 I try to download, no matter what user it's from.

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I do believe I did mention her. But at that point, I hadn't even heard of her before.

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Wierd - I've always had pretty good luck with songs being online when it says they are.

I dunno. Recently, anything I try to download from Napster gives me a "cannot access file" error. And this happens from Gnapster in Linux and Napster in Windows, so it's most likely not me. Or if it is, I have no clue what could be going on.

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Chuck D and any other establish artists has no interest what-so-ever in giving away for free the very thing that provides for him and his family.

Perhaps, but I think Chuck D is the type of guy who would gladly give up a couple bucks for the oportunity to stick it to "the man." After all, all that he loses for a pirated CD amounts to nothing more than pocket change, it's the Industry that really loses.

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Yes, /. users are more likely to have DC blocked, but if everyone on /. blocked DC, then there would be no reason for /. to serve DC ads; the ad views would never get registered and /. would get no money.

Uh, dude, opting out of DoubleClick only means they disable "Big Brother Mode" and not cross-reference your browsing habits with your personal information. In order for it to tell you've opted out, it still has to read the cookie, so the visit is logged. With a system dependant on knowing how many hits there have been, it would be really stupid to design it to ignore some on purpose. If you're really paranoid, you can just symlink your cookies file with /dev/null.

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she has not been in one bad movie

Umm... you must not have seen "Hackers", then.

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Anyone remember the godawful Wing Commander?

Heh, I always thought it was funny that the video game had better actors than the movie!

Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies and Malcom MacDowell were all in the 3rd one (Heart of the Tiger), the movie got a bunch of no-names (although Saphron Burrows is becoming slightly well-known) and a horrendously bad plot.

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Another good Exchange replacement is HP OpenMail. It is also fully MAPI compliant, all that good stuff. The guys on my LUG have been raving about it; yet another way of sneaking Linux in there :)

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No, it does not. I've been using DOS/Windows for roughly eight years, and I've been plagued by its flakiness the whole time. I think my annoyance at it reached a critical mass after I bought the Windows 98 upgrade--that's when I began looking for alternatives. Even Microsoft employees admit that the 98 upgrade blew.

As for driver support, that's hardly Linux's fault, now is it? Personally I think keeping your drivers secret is idiocy, but there's nothing I can do about it.

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If it's all Microsoft's fault for not playing nice, then you'd think Corel could at least make Word Perfect import Word documents perfectly even if Word doesn't do the same in reverse.

Okay, so even though Microsoft deliberatly changes their file formats as to force you to upgrade and dick with the competition simulatneously; as well as keeping the formats secret so anyone who wants to write compatibility has to reverse engineer them, it's Corel's fault for not being compatible. Uh-huh.

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