You can go on the pirate bay right now and download a library of like 10k sci-fi and fantasy books by hundreds of authors. All DRM free!
Yeah, but how many of these are recent? How many recent books can I actually find for devices like this? Part of the reason I haven't bought one is that so many books just don't seem to be available as e-books including programming stuff, adventure journalism, sci-fi / horror and autobiogs.
Pirate bay seems shit to me for books - I can never find any of the stuff I'm looking for, just thousands of self published crapfests.
The only thing holding me back from rushing to the store and buying a Sony PRS-505 is the fact that the primary supplier of e-books in the UK (Waterstones) wants me to pay more for the ebook than I can get the dead-tree version from Amazon, including next day delivery.
The dead tree version gets read by my wife and me, then gets kept for other people to borrow or donated to a charity store. The electronic version costs more and can only be read by one person unless we double our up-front costs and buy 2 readers. Then it does no good for charity either. Pass!
I avoid the police at all costs, to the point of not reporting violent crime that I was a first hand witness to. This is a direct result of my treatment at the hands of UK police when reporting crime in the past.
People ARE arrested for photographing things / buildings and people now and in around 10 days time (I forget the exact date) it will be illegal to publish a photograph of a police officer.
I was born there and have been there repeatedly and recently. I've also been to far worse places.
There are many healthy and active protests, and yes, there are risks with this. The difference there right now is death vs arrest here in the UK. That doesn't make the UK better, just less efficient.
Many of the armed checkpoints are vigilante run and are run for opportunist / profit motives.
Many countries with weak currency have laws about taking currency out of the country and will arrest you for this - this does not make them a police state. It's especially ludicrous when taking common currency is illegal - I got done trying to take CFA out of either CAR or Niger (I can't remember which), despite this being the primary currency in many countries in the region.
I call bullshit on your whole argument. Linux managed fine back in the 2.2 and 2.4 days when active development was done in a separate version (2.3 and 2.5). It improved during that time.
The developers are just lazy - they don't want the hard work of managing a development tree and managing major release cycles - fine. They expect the vendors to stabilise the ABI - again, fine. But those two decisions mean that Linux will never really grow outside of the server market.
Firstly, every distro is going to stabilize their ABI at a different point. This makes life hard / impossible for ISVs to support multiple distros which is partly why RedHat have such a massive marketshare in the bigger enterprise markets - the ISVs certify for running on RHEL. Sure, you could probably get it running on SLES or Ubuntu LTS, but you'll get less vendor support.
Secondly, it just makes Linux continue to look like a kiddie OS to the big vendors. Can't provide a stable ABI ? They why do you expect us to provide software for your toy?
We already have accuracy issues with the processors available today. I've worked with quant teams who will insist on only having machines with Intel processors in their compute farm, because they get a different result from the same code running on AMD machines. As the business has signed off the Intel numbers, Intel it is.
As I said at the time when the UK and the USA introduced these, they've just made their shitizens very attractive bomb targets - just set your bomb to only go off when a UK or USA passport is within reading distance.
I believe that we should incarcerate anyone who owns a knife. It's clear that some people have used knives to kill other people, so it's only fair that anyone who owns a knife should be sent to jail immediately!
I hope that the above sounds really fucking stupid to most people!
And yet all through this thread I see people saying "Let's punish Ubuntu because they bundle Firefox" and "Let's punish Apple because they bundle Safari." What you're all saying is "Let's punish other companies because Microsoft broke the law!"
I don't mean to be rude, but are you fucking stupid?
Do you really not understand the difference between what Microsoft did with IE (abusing one monopoly to gain another) and the situation with OS X?
The rules are different for Microsoft because they have been found guilty of monopoly violations. Separate judges all over the world found this.
Do you think we should force people who own knives to live in jail because we put murders in jail? It's the same thing as saying we should hurt Apple / Ubuntu because Microsoft did something bad and they are in similar businesses.
Firefox's market share is pathetic compared to IE - it borders on insignificant. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be so many sites out there still refusing to become 'firefox' compliant.
If MS had not abused their monopoly on the OS to gain a monopoly in the browser, it is quite likely that the browser market today would be more evenly split and web standards adherence would be far greater than it is. Microsoft really did the whole world a disservice with this and I'm sick and tired of watching people defend their actions or try and divert the discussion to irrelevant bullshit like hurting other operating systems.
Thanks for saving me a whole lot of typing and putting this all so clearly. For a place inhabited by supposedly bright people, a lot of/. readers are really fucking stupid. Beyond my pet peeve of not knowing the difference between trademarks and copyrights (and your legal duty to defend trademarks but not copyrights), they can't seem to understand the whole monopoly thing.
It's very simple people - Microsoft broke the law. This is not debatable - they were found to have broken the law by separate legal systems in at least 3 major jurisdictions. They abused a monopoly in one area (which was not illegal to have) to gain market share in another area (that's the illegal bit!)
As a result of breaking the law, the rules are now different for them. Just like every other criminal out there.
Only Microsoft has an effective desktop monopoly. No Linux distribution can claim even real competition, and OS X only has a fraction of the market. So all of the bullshit arguments about "why don't they make Ubuntu/Apple do foo" are just strawmen.
The fact that China shoot a lot of convicted felons in the head also goes some way to cutting down on numbers. But I'm not sure that's the solution we all want to be following:)
Don't let it worry you - I used to put GBP30,000 per annum into the US economy through business and pleasure visits. After getting detained by the idiot gestapo for actually following the rules, I stopped doing that. The business money now generates far more return, and my vacations have taken me to more diverse places as a result.
Sure, the US economy and its victims have lost over $100,000 from me, but at least I'll never have to deal with the TSA again:)
To clarify why I was stopped and separated from my wife on her birthday, then kept away from her for several hours while she was not told anything, read on... I applied for a new passport because the US visa waiver programme requires that you have at least 6 months validity on your password on the date of entry. Mine would have had just under 6 months validity left for this trip, so 2 months before travelling I applied for a new passport.
When I finally got someone from the SS to talk to me about why they were detaining me, we cleared it up pretty quickly:
Hitler: Why did you apply for a new passport when your old one was still valid? Me: Huh? Hiter: Your previous visits were on a different passport. That one would still have been valid. Why did you get a new one? What are you trying to hide? Me: Uh, the old one would have only had 5 and a bit months left on it. Your visa programme says it has to be valid for at least 6 months Hitler: What? Me: Well, my old one wouldn't have enough months left valid to qualify for the visa waiver programme Hitler: fx: looks at papers and wanders off
About 30 minutes later they finally cut me loose. And that's how the US economy lost $100,000 to date.
Being told I can't buy a 6 day supply of Day / Night Nurse is a problem for me. So it has paracetemol - so fucking what.
Until you actually take meth and heroin off the streets, why should I not be able to buy medication that I use as directed and in a sensible way?
Sure, I can just go to another pharmacy, but why should I have to ? Why, when I'm ill, snot streaming from all orifices, should I be forced to wander the neighborhood out in the cold (which probably doesn't help my condition) to get around some silly regulations designed to protect stupid people ?
And who runs all of the A&E wards that a normal human being can go to ? The NHS.
In the circle of people I know, I don't know anyone who can afford to go to a private hospital for an A&E type situation. Sure, those of us with private health insurance can go private for followup treatment, but initial treatment is always on the NHS if it's at an odd time of day.
He probably doesn't like the national health care because he's had to use it.
I've made use of the NHS both in rural areas and within London, and I will say that it is a completely different experience. In metropolitan areas, it just does not work. Try waiting 4 hours to see a ER doctor while sitting in a waiting room with drunks fighting and bleeding all over you - you'll go off of national health care pretty quickly.
There is a new law going onto the books in the UK that will make it illegal to obstruct a police office from taking pictures of people. I believe this same law will make it illegal to publish pictures that identify certain breeds of coppers (forward intelligence teams).
Again one of those retards who still think in terms of "software product versions", despite calling themselves "experts". There are no "versions". There are packagers. Companies, and other groups.
That's not entirely true. Since the genius decision to do development in the current kernel tree (2.6) when the developers decided that vendors should stabilise the kernel, there are quite a few different versions.
Each vendor, especially in the enterprise space will apply significantly different patches to their Linux kernel. These differences mean that software will behave differently on two different boxes with the same major kernel version
Do you know what changed in London after a concerted, coordinated bombing attack on multiple trains and a bus?
Nothing. Fuck all.
We have no extra security. We have no extra stupid processes that we have to go through to travel. We're just big enough to accept that life has risks and get on with it.
Land of the Free - some restrictions may apply. Home of the brave... ish...
This whole 'pay to receive a message' lark must really be stifling innovation out there. We have loads of cool services available that use SMS as the notification method for things like travel, payment reminders, etc. I don't think many of these would exist if we had to pay to receive those messages.
Slashdot Mirror
You can go on the pirate bay right now and download a library of like 10k sci-fi and fantasy books by hundreds of authors. All DRM free!
Yeah, but how many of these are recent? How many recent books can I actually find for devices like this? Part of the reason I haven't bought one is that so many books just don't seem to be available as e-books including programming stuff, adventure journalism, sci-fi / horror and autobiogs.
Pirate bay seems shit to me for books - I can never find any of the stuff I'm looking for, just thousands of self published crapfests.
The only thing holding me back from rushing to the store and buying a Sony PRS-505 is the fact that the primary supplier of e-books in the UK (Waterstones) wants me to pay more for the ebook than I can get the dead-tree version from Amazon, including next day delivery.
The dead tree version gets read by my wife and me, then gets kept for other people to borrow or donated to a charity store. The electronic version costs more and can only be read by one person unless we double our up-front costs and buy 2 readers. Then it does no good for charity either. Pass!
I avoid the police at all costs, to the point of not reporting violent crime that I was a first hand witness to. This is a direct result of my treatment at the hands of UK police when reporting crime in the past.
People ARE arrested for photographing things / buildings and people now and in around 10 days time (I forget the exact date) it will be illegal to publish a photograph of a police officer.
I was born there and have been there repeatedly and recently. I've also been to far worse places.
There are many healthy and active protests, and yes, there are risks with this. The difference there right now is death vs arrest here in the UK. That doesn't make the UK better, just less efficient.
Many of the armed checkpoints are vigilante run and are run for opportunist / profit motives.
Many countries with weak currency have laws about taking currency out of the country and will arrest you for this - this does not make them a police state. It's especially ludicrous when taking common currency is illegal - I got done trying to take CFA out of either CAR or Niger (I can't remember which), despite this being the primary currency in many countries in the region.
Being the second fattest chick in the bar does NOT make you skinny!
Just because there are worse places out there is no good reason to allow our own lands to slide.
I call bullshit on your whole argument. Linux managed fine back in the 2.2 and 2.4 days when active development was done in a separate version (2.3 and 2.5). It improved during that time.
The developers are just lazy - they don't want the hard work of managing a development tree and managing major release cycles - fine. They expect the vendors to stabilise the ABI - again, fine. But those two decisions mean that Linux will never really grow outside of the server market.
Firstly, every distro is going to stabilize their ABI at a different point. This makes life hard / impossible for ISVs to support multiple distros which is partly why RedHat have such a massive marketshare in the bigger enterprise markets - the ISVs certify for running on RHEL. Sure, you could probably get it running on SLES or Ubuntu LTS, but you'll get less vendor support.
Secondly, it just makes Linux continue to look like a kiddie OS to the big vendors. Can't provide a stable ABI ? They why do you expect us to provide software for your toy?
We already have accuracy issues with the processors available today. I've worked with quant teams who will insist on only having machines with Intel processors in their compute farm, because they get a different result from the same code running on AMD machines. As the business has signed off the Intel numbers, Intel it is.
Why bother with kidnapping ?
As I said at the time when the UK and the USA introduced these, they've just made their shitizens very attractive bomb targets - just set your bomb to only go off when a UK or USA passport is within reading distance.
I believe that we should incarcerate anyone who owns a knife. It's clear that some people have used knives to kill other people, so it's only fair that anyone who owns a knife should be sent to jail immediately!
I hope that the above sounds really fucking stupid to most people!
And yet all through this thread I see people saying "Let's punish Ubuntu because they bundle Firefox" and "Let's punish Apple because they bundle Safari." What you're all saying is "Let's punish other companies because Microsoft broke the law!"
I don't mean to be rude, but are you fucking stupid?
Do you really not understand the difference between what Microsoft did with IE (abusing one monopoly to gain another) and the situation with OS X?
The rules are different for Microsoft because they have been found guilty of monopoly violations. Separate judges all over the world found this.
Do you think we should force people who own knives to live in jail because we put murders in jail? It's the same thing as saying we should hurt Apple / Ubuntu because Microsoft did something bad and they are in similar businesses.
Firefox's market share is pathetic compared to IE - it borders on insignificant. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be so many sites out there still refusing to become 'firefox' compliant.
If MS had not abused their monopoly on the OS to gain a monopoly in the browser, it is quite likely that the browser market today would be more evenly split and web standards adherence would be far greater than it is. Microsoft really did the whole world a disservice with this and I'm sick and tired of watching people defend their actions or try and divert the discussion to irrelevant bullshit like hurting other operating systems.
Where, oh where are my mod points ?
Thanks for saving me a whole lot of typing and putting this all so clearly. For a place inhabited by supposedly bright people, a lot of /. readers are really fucking stupid. Beyond my pet peeve of not knowing the difference between trademarks and copyrights (and your legal duty to defend trademarks but not copyrights), they can't seem to understand the whole monopoly thing.
It's very simple people - Microsoft broke the law. This is not debatable - they were found to have broken the law by separate legal systems in at least 3 major jurisdictions. They abused a monopoly in one area (which was not illegal to have) to gain market share in another area (that's the illegal bit!)
As a result of breaking the law, the rules are now different for them. Just like every other criminal out there.
Only Microsoft has an effective desktop monopoly. No Linux distribution can claim even real competition, and OS X only has a fraction of the market. So all of the bullshit arguments about "why don't they make Ubuntu/Apple do foo" are just strawmen.
Sheesh. I need my coffee :)
The fact that China shoot a lot of convicted felons in the head also goes some way to cutting down on numbers. But I'm not sure that's the solution we all want to be following :)
You went to a better school thasn me. :-(
Yep - I think we have sufficient evidence of that ;)
You mean the rest of us write the date correctly - in order of significance
dd/mm/yy
smallest/smaller/biggest
...when you insist on doing development in the 'stable' kernel tree and expect vendors to stablise it.
Genius!
Somebody should start one of those financial countdown clocks...
"How many 100's of 1000's of $$s have the TSA and US Immigration cost YOU!"
But obviously with a snappier title :)
Don't let it worry you - I used to put GBP30,000 per annum into the US economy through business and pleasure visits. After getting detained by the idiot gestapo for actually following the rules, I stopped doing that. The business money now generates far more return, and my vacations have taken me to more diverse places as a result.
Sure, the US economy and its victims have lost over $100,000 from me, but at least I'll never have to deal with the TSA again :)
To clarify why I was stopped and separated from my wife on her birthday, then kept away from her for several hours while she was not told anything, read on... I applied for a new passport because the US visa waiver programme requires that you have at least 6 months validity on your password on the date of entry. Mine would have had just under 6 months validity left for this trip, so 2 months before travelling I applied for a new passport.
When I finally got someone from the SS to talk to me about why they were detaining me, we cleared it up pretty quickly:
Hitler: Why did you apply for a new passport when your old one was still valid?
Me: Huh?
Hiter: Your previous visits were on a different passport. That one would still have been valid. Why did you get a new one? What are you trying to hide?
Me: Uh, the old one would have only had 5 and a bit months left on it. Your visa programme says it has to be valid for at least 6 months
Hitler: What?
Me: Well, my old one wouldn't have enough months left valid to qualify for the visa waiver programme
Hitler: fx: looks at papers and wanders off
About 30 minutes later they finally cut me loose. And that's how the US economy lost $100,000 to date.
Being told I can't buy a 6 day supply of Day / Night Nurse is a problem for me. So it has paracetemol - so fucking what.
Until you actually take meth and heroin off the streets, why should I not be able to buy medication that I use as directed and in a sensible way?
Sure, I can just go to another pharmacy, but why should I have to ? Why, when I'm ill, snot streaming from all orifices, should I be forced to wander the neighborhood out in the cold (which probably doesn't help my condition) to get around some silly regulations designed to protect stupid people ?
And who runs all of the A&E wards that a normal human being can go to ? The NHS.
In the circle of people I know, I don't know anyone who can afford to go to a private hospital for an A&E type situation. Sure, those of us with private health insurance can go private for followup treatment, but initial treatment is always on the NHS if it's at an odd time of day.
He probably doesn't like the national health care because he's had to use it.
I've made use of the NHS both in rural areas and within London, and I will say that it is a completely different experience. In metropolitan areas, it just does not work. Try waiting 4 hours to see a ER doctor while sitting in a waiting room with drunks fighting and bleeding all over you - you'll go off of national health care pretty quickly.
Hell, I can't even legally buy enough cold medication to spend 5 days at home resting - the max I can buy is a 3 day supply - that's another helpful thing that these stupid fucking people have given us - http://blog.penguinpowered.org/2008/12/31/gps-should-pull-their-heads-out-of-their-arses/
There is a new law going onto the books in the UK that will make it illegal to obstruct a police office from taking pictures of people. I believe this same law will make it illegal to publish pictures that identify certain breeds of coppers (forward intelligence teams).
Again one of those retards who still think in terms of "software product versions", despite calling themselves "experts".
There are no "versions". There are packagers. Companies, and other groups.
That's not entirely true. Since the genius decision to do development in the current kernel tree (2.6) when the developers decided that vendors should stabilise the kernel, there are quite a few different versions.
Each vendor, especially in the enterprise space will apply significantly different patches to their Linux kernel. These differences mean that software will behave differently on two different boxes with the same major kernel version
Do you know what changed in London after a concerted, coordinated bombing attack on multiple trains and a bus?
Nothing. Fuck all.
We have no extra security. We have no extra stupid processes that we have to go through to travel. We're just big enough to accept that life has risks and get on with it.
Land of the Free - some restrictions may apply. Home of the brave... ish...
This whole 'pay to receive a message' lark must really be stifling innovation out there. We have loads of cool services available that use SMS as the notification method for things like travel, payment reminders, etc. I don't think many of these would exist if we had to pay to receive those messages.
All iTunes media can be played through iTunes on Windows. Windows is not normally run on Apple hardware.