[blocking port 25 for people with owned machines] might cost the ISP's money. So instead we get a "best practice" document which preaches to the converted and achieves nothing.
No, this it the beginning of legislative effort. They clearly state this at the end of their press release. The object is to get laws passed about what ISPs do and to make the net easy for them to control. It's everything the people who designed the internet fought against and what is left will more resemble broadcast TV.
The goal, of course, is to secure government protection for the current status of the companies and to stomp out free software. Any kind of government regulations place barriers on new entrants. The proposed solutions are, in part, Microsoft solutions. Microsoft will be at an advantage to limit the number of ISPs and they can do that if legislation requires the use of Microsoft junk. Even if the members can guide the legislation and defeat Microsoft, the email authentication requirements can be used to defeat new ISP entrants. They are attempting to make the network "smart" so that they can control it.
The trend is unmistakable, these guys want to be the "asshole in the middle" of everything. They destroyed AtHome, DSL providers and all semblence of competition in the ISP market. Now they are using that control to gain even more. They have the gaul to advocate "legitimate" spam in their press release.
... a person has control over a number of zombie machines on the internet; that person simply drives to one of these free wifi zones and begins launching DoS attacks
Bot makers have long been concerned with anonymous and obscure control of their networks. Only the most clueless of script kiddies would need to drive to a public access point or think that would help them. They are also the type that would forget to reprogram their wifi MAC address or know about other identification mechanisms. A competent bot owner has thousands of computers to share the task of administering their network. The continued deluge of spam and DoS attacks coming from owned Windoze machines and the lack of arrested responsible parties proves the above points.
People who are afraid of public access points would be better served by outlawing windoze on public networks.
Wifi at rest stops is as good an idea as public phones and restrooms at rest stops. No additional harm will be done to the public and most people will enjoy the service. It might even do what it is intended to do and reduce traffic accidents. The worst thing that people can do is deny the service.
Existence proofs do change conversations, unless you are surrounded by fanatics. Private space, however, is going to be a lot harder than sub orbital flights.
It's not getting up that's the problem, it's coming down from orbit. Going up is proving easier and doable. Coming down should work as well. Your problem is where you land if something goes wrong. It's not the cost of the craft, it's the safety of the crew that's expensive.
Only governments and large companies can field the rescue effort required for accidents. Most of the world's surface is ocean and private rescue is still unlikely. US astronauts, from the beginning, were trained to survive for days on land and at sea. This was despite having the entire US Navy waiting for them with good radar contacts around the world. The world is a large place and it's easy to get lost in it while no one is watching. At the moment, I doubt that a reasonable rescue could be fielded by anything but government or a cooperative effort of all the world's oil companies. I have my doubts about the oil companies even if they wanted a launch.
While we can and should expect the world's governments to share tracking information, you still want to have rescue waiting all around the world. Just imagine yourself having to ditch into the middle of the Indian Ocean. This is going to remain an expensive obstacle until space flight is common enough for people to make a living at rescue and facilities are built.
Don't get me wrong, private space will come and it's a great thing to work on. We should simply be aware of the larger problems before we call suborbital flight an existence proof of private space. The Wright brother's were a better proof of commercial aviation. I envy those lucky few who get paid to work on private space ventures.
But, we should still make consideration for the fact that hotmail has tons of users.
It's sheer software fanaticism coupled with greed that has stagnated Hotmail. I can consider Hotmail's user load for about half a second. Then I remember Hotmail's history and know that Microsoft has taken a cool thing and run it into the ground.
Microsoft has wasted tons of money and time converting Hotmail over to their own OS. The effort failed more than once and they had to increase the number of machines just to keep up with stagnant or declining demand. Their own consultants use the Hotmail example of Unix virtues. Is it any wonder that the only improvements have been cosmetic and trivial?
The list of improvements is slim. Microsoft has added some spam filtering, "folders". They have also improved the attachment dialogs so that it's easier to fill your 2500KB. You also get more adds. Singles adds my wife finds cheesy and offensive.
The service has been unusable for a couple of years. My wife seems happy with it, but she's also happy with clear channel and other advert heavy broadcasts. Watching her try to get things done with it is sort of like watching someone try to eat well buttered, American rice with chopsticks. It's impossible for her and family members to exchange files over 2K despite cable modems at both ends.
Or, if you're not a developer, can't write code to save your life and really aren't qualified to comment on an article about programming language performance, please say so.
I would have liked to see more of a comparison of exactly what EFI gives you over Open Firmware... It's funny to have a whole article about EFI then show all the cool things you can do with an advanced BIOS by giving Open Firmware demos.
The page does a nice job furfilling it's stated purpose, but suffers from a lack of segregation that might be confusing. The author cited example for EFI in Part I. He could have put those links into a separate section in part II. This is a minor formatting problem and I'm happy that the resource has been created.
"Part I: The Firmware Scene." gives you what it promises. If you look through the headings you will see, Legacy Pains, EFI, Open Firmware and Others. Wow, that's a lot to cover.
"Part II: GUI Widgets In Open Firmware", also gives you what it says it does, though it looks like it does not follow because it only talks about Open Firmware. Amit could have made it into examples and put his EFI link in as the EFI example and talked about it a little.
Overall, Amit has created a nice resource. He gives objective descriptions without much opinion. I would not have bothered to mention closed source and I can only imagine how much trouble it is to keep informed about things that the developing companies want to hide details of.
It rejected Mozilla 1.0 and 1.6 for me but it let Konqueror in. That's strange because Konq is sending the default browser ID, Mozilla/5.0.
There's not much useful information on the page, unless you own one and need a ROM upgrade. But it should let in the O2's own browser, right? Here is a review of the thing that tells you more than the site does.
The main clue would be this... I can understand java having better than expected performance.. but there is no way I can accept that java is that much FASTER than properly done C++... it doesn't make any sense.
Clues in order:
The page was replaced by a bunch of "I hate Slashdot" bullshit. Doug should really be complaining that his hoster was hosing him for a a foreseeable event. Well, maybe he thought no one would be interested in flamebait.
The title. "The Java is Faster than C++ and C++ Sucks, Unbiased Benchmark" Sucks? The only thing that ever sucks in a computer language is when the language changes and breaks your code.
The pile on of trolls here repeating the same BS as you find on the "quit slashdot" page. Mostly bull about how Slashdot's editors and readers can not be trusted for technical information.
The article is a troll. It was designed to FUD Slashdot. Well done, assholes. Between this and Google bombing, it will be harder for some of us to learn. Whatever Microsoft is paying you for this stuff is too much. This is as transparent as the Apple Switcher.
Interestingly enough, the trolls are also wrong. Now that the article is visible, people are picking it to pieces. I doubt people are going to walk away with the wrong impression.
In any case, I could care less. Java is non free. As nifty as it is, I can do the same things with free code. Even if java was faster at this and that, the fact that it's not free makes it a dead end. Sun's not an evil company today, but they can become one tomorrow. Why would I put my work in their hands when I can own it myself?
I like portability of my music so I use MP3. (I can't very well install the codec on my machine at work.)... How many people is it a good choice for? Why?
I used ogg audio to encode my music collection because I didn't have an mp3 encoder and I consider it a lucky break. It was easier to use krecord, audacity and abcde in Debian Woody than it was to get any kind of mp3 encoder. The files turned out to be smaller but of comparable quality to downloaded mp3's. I did it mostly so I would not have to worry about my dying phonograph player and saved out wav files before encoding. abcde worked great for my CDs and the collection, as you know, is much more convenient on a hard drive.
As for devices, having ogg forced me to get a Zaurus as a portable player. My handspring visor, though still useful, needed upgrading. Zaurus plays both ogg and mp3 from CF or MMC and does so without the annoying DRM problems most players have. So, my $250 investment in Zaurus served more than one function, though it might not be as nice and surely is not as rugged as dedicated players that now cater to ogg. Sharp promisses you can sync Zaurus to outlook as well as read Word Docs.
I'm not qualified to talk about video formats yet, but I have a feeling that I'm going to like theora.
I was actually dumb enough to click that and get to see the obnoxious Slash hole page again.
The article must have been a troll. It recommends non-free software. It's counter intuitive and contrary to most people's experience and therefore technically dubious. That's rich, given the inflammatory page it points to complains that you can't trust Slashdot for technical content. The whole thing looks like a set up to make Slashdot look as bad as possible. Doug should know better and is therefore suspect.
Doug should be complaining about his TOS rather than the "Slashdot effect". Attention is what you get when you post material of technical merit onto the web. The "Slashdot Effect" is just another one of those facts of life we all have to live with, like hurricanes. TOS that don't deal with that possibility are screwing Doug, not Slashdot. This is one of those things that ISPs need to deal with. Every two bit data center on earth has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on off electric generating equipment, HVAC, and physical security. Responsible ISPs don't slap their users because other people launch a DoS attack on them. Yes, 99% of the dreaded Slashdot attack is a DoS attack generated by people who don't like Slashdot. I doubt that escaped Doug's notice.
The quit slashdot site is flame bait hardly worthy of a reply. Slashdot does cull it's stories well and there is usefull information to be had reading the blurbs. Yes, the comments have been run over by determined and well organized trolls. It's been more than a year since I've been given mod points. I could care less. I have fun here anyway and the exercise keeps my writing skills sharp. Yep, my GRE verbal and writing sample were top decile. This is not a service I get from passive news feeds by supposed "experts" and industry shills that generally follow Slashdot by a week or more. Eat me trolls. Am I rabid and foaming at the mouth over it? Hell no. I could care less about insults delivered by people I don't know and I get to shout it all out here.
Twitter is laughing all the way to his next 16 ounce curl at this latest nasty attack on his favorite news service.
You will probably have a hard time attracting wireless users to connect only to local content.
You can say that about any web site. This site has the advantage that he's hosting it himself and can put hundreds of gigabytes worth of content up. With all that space, he can make his site very interesting without having to pay an arm and a leg to a hosting provider. I think that's what he means by BBS community spirit, doing it yourself and having lots of interesting stuff.
I imagine that the only reason he's blocking "internet" access trough his wireless is to avoid angering his ISP. It will be impossible, and foolish, for him to keep his content from pointing to the outside world. Most of the people who connect to his network are going to also have internet access and have it while they are browsing his pages.
It will also be difficult to keep his content off the internet itself. Someone who's not worried about angering their ISP and our hero could forward ports and serve the whole thing up to the internet at large while making it look like all the traffic was going to a local wireless connection. Anyone know a way to tell the difference?
I'd set up a single machine ad hock and give it a static IP. He could also set up a WAP and have this machine hooked into an ethernet port on the back and that would be easier. I'd run Debian because that's what I know. He could set up http, anonymous ftp and shell accounts. He'd have to advertise it on the web or with a handbill. Colliding with other WAPs might get messy.
A pesky AC troll asks the offtopic question, before blithering some further nonsense about M$'s big piles of money:
You really think Microsoft is going to throw all of their resources into one thing?
OK, there really are two things they spend money on, acquisitions and advertising. Acquisitions includes DRM. Trolling Slashdot is part of their advertising effort. Enron had piles of money too. Too bad M$ has not used it's supposedly vast resources to fix, much less improve it's third rate browser in the last two years. How's that for a clue?
Isn't that the way things are usually done, to try to improve a product?
Yes, but things don't always go that way before 1.0. In general odd numbered releases are for new features and are not as stable as even numbered releases. I'm not sure if the Mozilla people follow all of those rules or not, but it's good to let current firebird users know that they won't be punished for moving up.
But while IE can claim that it "came with My Computer" Firefox cannot overcome it but very slowly and only among those who appreciate its superiority and have enough patience to download and install it.
I've read this one enough now to want to pop it. Companies like Dell, HP and others might want to tweak their customer's machines with this or Mozilla itself as a default browser. While this is hard to do, it can be done and vendors looking for a competitive edge in a world of look and work alike machines might make the move. They have already started to sell machines with Linux on them and that proves that the anti-trust bust has had some small liberating effect on big dumb vendors.
When someone tells me that the local Cable company does not "support" anything but Outlook Express on M$, I tell them that people who don't use that program or that platform don't need a tenth of the support.
If they think FireFox is a legitimate threat, expect some significant work on IE.
What, like reviving their superior version of IE for Mac or porting some of the features to Winblows? Fat chance.
Microsoft is putting all of it's efforts into "security". That is DRM, code signing and BIOS efforts that will lock out competition. Their idea of competing it to break the competitor. If they were interested in improvements, they could have fixed some of the longstanding bugs that have been used recently to blow up systems.
Bought? What do you figure they've bought? DOS 1.0? GW-BASIC? What else that is relevant in the current Windows codebase?
A better question is what parts are really Microsoft's. A short list of software bought either up front or through court imposed fines includes; Their browser, Backup software, Defrag software, just about everything. They even got notepad from ATT.
They have added to the code and packaged it, but companies like Red Hat do that much and more.
Microsoft's publicly stated software growth model is to wait until a market is "mature" then buy their way into it. They call people who make new things, "loss leaders". This works well when you want to take money from investors. It's no big deal, except they continue to also portray themselves to the public as "innovators" instead of what they are, a software vendor.
I don't understand all the slams.
on
Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 1
Fill in the blank,
There are more people contributing to _____ than actually Care or Can do anyting about it
Is it:
blogs
web sites
free software
independent music
independent film
church
charity
government
???? any other non-hyped means of expression or group effort? How can someone running a web page like your own say such a thing?
Blogs are web pages for people who don't have the knowhow to get a site hosted and built. They can and are authored by people who know about other things, like riding a bike. Why slam them as empty expression because they might not be able to present it as nicely as you do? Would you be bothered if Brad or Jimmy got themselves a blog?
However, when users flat out reject them it is not the place of the developers to say "quit your bitching, we know what is best for you."
Sokol could have been more diplomatic and clear. He's not dissing users, he is dissing reviewers. There's a big difference.
In any case, what's really to complain about? Gnome is free software. If you don't like it, fix it or don't use it. If the developers of Gnome have been good to you in the past but are now running down a path that you don't like? Just be happy for the good things they did for you.
I don't understand the bile and anger that the Gnome team is getting for doing what all free software should. Free software is a DIY thing. Gnome developers think what they are doing is what newbies want. That's their business and you, as a power user, should know several alternatives to make yourself happy. If Gnome is broken, you get to keep all the pieces.
stop confusing the GNUbies with the blasted "GNU/Linux" name... Just call it Linux. Not Lindows, not GNU/Linux, not the endless new and old distribution names
By that logic, I'd have to call Windoze and OS X BSD.
Distribution names are appropriate and easy to explain. Windows itself is a commercial distribution of software, a collection of stuff they have bought, coppied from BSD and written themselves. Newbies can understand that and they can understand that a GNU/Linux distribution is just another collection of software that happens to be free. It's an easy concept to transfer except you can promise the newbie that free software will remain free and tell them how they can share it with others. More importantly, the newbie needs to know the distribution name so they can look for help when they need it. The list is not endless, the newbie only needs to know about one or two distributions that meet their needs. This leads to much less confusion than gross simplifications like, this is all "Linux".
In any case this thread is about a new Wiki service where you can write about things that confuse newbies if you care. When you get there, you will see that the information they are looking for is specific to applications and distributions. It will be very helpful to developers of the applications and to documentation writers. If you have gripes about real problems, get going.
... a newbie shouldn't have to deal with the nuances of OSS vs. ALSA vs. JACK or CUPS vs. LPR just to listen to music and print a document.
Knoppix and friends autoconfigure these things. Distros like Mepis install those settings to the newbie's hard drive with a few GUI clicks. Other distros like Red Hat and Mandrake have done this for years, but Mepis gives you the chance to try it out off the CD without risk to the newbie.
In any case, the point of the project is collect specific information about specific applications, so that developers can change their manuals or programs if they are inclined. If you think a control panel is lacking, by all means, write in. Be sure to include specific details of what confused you. If you think this is too much trouble to go through, ask yourelf what commercial vendor listens this way. Keep those thoughts in mind the next time you have a problem and you get stuck in the hardware - software blame shifting game played by most people who demand money for their services.
I hope this gets laughed out. The whole point of unlicensed frequency is to let the public enjoy it's benefit in any way they can. Dumber things have been attempted. The greedheads are very clever to use the highly regulated airport environment to make case and have a chance of getting anywhere. Airports will have a good starting point for future propaganda that turns today's common sense on it's head. The thing to remember is that the public owns the spectrum, not government agencies, commercial broadcasters, or property owners.
Movie theaters and other centers of idiotic greed have jamed cellphones and pagers. While I can admit that hearing cellphones go off in movie theaters is annoying, the problem rests with users not the phones. How would you like your doctor to not get a vibrating page because he was on call at a movie theater that blocked calls without notice? Interfering with licensed cell phone frequencies should earn such clueless people a stiff FCC fine. The public owns the spectrum, not the theater.
There was another case I remember, of a ball park that thought it could override the FCC and prevent people from setting up free wireless access within range of the park. They wanted to sell access to their "captive" audience. The mistake being made, once again, is that the landlord somehow owns the spectrum inside the park. They are wrong, the public owns the spectrum regardless of what the ball park tries to set up.
The airport is a brilliant place for greedheads to try to take ownership of the spectrum. Real and bogus safety concerns can be raised in such a technical environment. These concerns can easily be twisted into "property rights" propaganda. More importantly, there are multiple agencies who would claim to represent the public interest. If the greedheads work this right, they can leverage the effort of local, state and other federal agencies. They will all bombard the FCC and might even try to seize authority over the spectrum for themselves. It will make news and bullshit will spill forth into the minds of the public.
To get an idea of how backward this is, ask yourself what rights you have to the spectrum on your own property. Can you control the flow of radio waves into your own property? No, you have no right to demand that TV, radio and other broadcasters cease to transmit because you don't want their signal in your house. Nor can you charge them for a chicken wire Faraday cage. That's reasonable. (Unreasonable laws exist which attempting to prevent you from listening to some of the broadcasts and sharing your information about how to do so.) Broadcasters include people with cell phones and wifi adapters.
Blocking broadcasts will cause great economic harm for the benefit of a few operators. Regulation in this spirit will thwart any kind of mesh network building and preserve the obsolete natural monopoly enjoyed by incumbent telco providers. The most perverse aspect of this is that "property owners" may be convinced to go this way by the promise of profit from subscription wifi. What are the chances that profits from wifi and other wanna be telco services will ever be greater than the savings of simple co-operation and mesh networking?
I have no idea what you are talking about. You ask:
So there are only 2 options? Make it hard for newbies or make it hard for regular users?
No, I said that there were users who will like this. I'm not sure where you get the above from that. If you don't like it, fix it or leave it alone. To read all the negative comments, you would think that Gnome is impossible for anyone to use and that's a crock of shit.
I prefer KDE, myself but the level of flamage over one dinky feature is way overblown. Gnome has great packages like Evolution and people should not be scared off of it because of one correctable file browser annoyance that some people I know will like.
Most installation programs for Windows give you the choice of the default install or the custom install and I've never heard anyone complain that the choice was too hard to make.
And most distributions include things like KDM which let you select what window manager you want to use and each window manager reads each user's preference files and remembers exactly what each user wants. If you want, you can modify the skeleton files and each new user will get the kind of behavior you want them to have. What are you getting at?
Slashdot Mirror
No, this it the beginning of legislative effort. They clearly state this at the end of their press release. The object is to get laws passed about what ISPs do and to make the net easy for them to control. It's everything the people who designed the internet fought against and what is left will more resemble broadcast TV.
The goal, of course, is to secure government protection for the current status of the companies and to stomp out free software. Any kind of government regulations place barriers on new entrants. The proposed solutions are, in part, Microsoft solutions. Microsoft will be at an advantage to limit the number of ISPs and they can do that if legislation requires the use of Microsoft junk. Even if the members can guide the legislation and defeat Microsoft, the email authentication requirements can be used to defeat new ISP entrants. They are attempting to make the network "smart" so that they can control it.
The trend is unmistakable, these guys want to be the "asshole in the middle" of everything. They destroyed AtHome, DSL providers and all semblence of competition in the ISP market. Now they are using that control to gain even more. They have the gaul to advocate "legitimate" spam in their press release.
All of this places the blame far from where it belongs. Spam is a problem that comes from and mostly affects Microsoft run computers. It is disgusting that the trouble maker will be one of the main beneficiary of the proposed solution.
Bot makers have long been concerned with anonymous and obscure control of their networks. Only the most clueless of script kiddies would need to drive to a public access point or think that would help them. They are also the type that would forget to reprogram their wifi MAC address or know about other identification mechanisms. A competent bot owner has thousands of computers to share the task of administering their network. The continued deluge of spam and DoS attacks coming from owned Windoze machines and the lack of arrested responsible parties proves the above points.
People who are afraid of public access points would be better served by outlawing windoze on public networks.
Wifi at rest stops is as good an idea as public phones and restrooms at rest stops. No additional harm will be done to the public and most people will enjoy the service. It might even do what it is intended to do and reduce traffic accidents. The worst thing that people can do is deny the service.
It's not getting up that's the problem, it's coming down from orbit. Going up is proving easier and doable. Coming down should work as well. Your problem is where you land if something goes wrong. It's not the cost of the craft, it's the safety of the crew that's expensive.
Only governments and large companies can field the rescue effort required for accidents. Most of the world's surface is ocean and private rescue is still unlikely. US astronauts, from the beginning, were trained to survive for days on land and at sea. This was despite having the entire US Navy waiting for them with good radar contacts around the world. The world is a large place and it's easy to get lost in it while no one is watching. At the moment, I doubt that a reasonable rescue could be fielded by anything but government or a cooperative effort of all the world's oil companies. I have my doubts about the oil companies even if they wanted a launch.
While we can and should expect the world's governments to share tracking information, you still want to have rescue waiting all around the world. Just imagine yourself having to ditch into the middle of the Indian Ocean. This is going to remain an expensive obstacle until space flight is common enough for people to make a living at rescue and facilities are built.
Don't get me wrong, private space will come and it's a great thing to work on. We should simply be aware of the larger problems before we call suborbital flight an existence proof of private space. The Wright brother's were a better proof of commercial aviation. I envy those lucky few who get paid to work on private space ventures.
It's sheer software fanaticism coupled with greed that has stagnated Hotmail. I can consider Hotmail's user load for about half a second. Then I remember Hotmail's history and know that Microsoft has taken a cool thing and run it into the ground.
Microsoft has wasted tons of money and time converting Hotmail over to their own OS. The effort failed more than once and they had to increase the number of machines just to keep up with stagnant or declining demand. Their own consultants use the Hotmail example of Unix virtues. Is it any wonder that the only improvements have been cosmetic and trivial?
The list of improvements is slim. Microsoft has added some spam filtering, "folders". They have also improved the attachment dialogs so that it's easier to fill your 2500KB. You also get more adds. Singles adds my wife finds cheesy and offensive.
The service has been unusable for a couple of years. My wife seems happy with it, but she's also happy with clear channel and other advert heavy broadcasts. Watching her try to get things done with it is sort of like watching someone try to eat well buttered, American rice with chopsticks. It's impossible for her and family members to exchange files over 2K despite cable modems at both ends.
Oh well.
Or, if you're not a developer, can't write code to save your life and really aren't qualified to comment on an article about programming language performance, please say so.
No, bother, I was right, the article was a troll. The Java server is impressively fast, but C is still faster for most purposes.
The page does a nice job furfilling it's stated purpose, but suffers from a lack of segregation that might be confusing. The author cited example for EFI in Part I. He could have put those links into a separate section in part II. This is a minor formatting problem and I'm happy that the resource has been created.
"Part I: The Firmware Scene." gives you what it promises. If you look through the headings you will see, Legacy Pains, EFI, Open Firmware and Others. Wow, that's a lot to cover.
"Part II: GUI Widgets In Open Firmware", also gives you what it says it does, though it looks like it does not follow because it only talks about Open Firmware. Amit could have made it into examples and put his EFI link in as the EFI example and talked about it a little.
Overall, Amit has created a nice resource. He gives objective descriptions without much opinion. I would not have bothered to mention closed source and I can only imagine how much trouble it is to keep informed about things that the developing companies want to hide details of.
There's not much useful information on the page, unless you own one and need a ROM upgrade. But it should let in the O2's own browser, right? Here is a review of the thing that tells you more than the site does.
give us a link. Some PHP or Perl or JSP site, or some project you've contributed to, or your personal project page or some commit log with your name.
Sure, I'd love to have you assholes do the same things to me and mine what you do to Slashdot. Why don't you check out all the fine code at:
This site.
Clues in order:
The article is a troll. It was designed to FUD Slashdot. Well done, assholes. Between this and Google bombing, it will be harder for some of us to learn. Whatever Microsoft is paying you for this stuff is too much. This is as transparent as the Apple Switcher.
Interestingly enough, the trolls are also wrong. Now that the article is visible, people are picking it to pieces. I doubt people are going to walk away with the wrong impression.
In any case, I could care less. Java is non free. As nifty as it is, I can do the same things with free code. Even if java was faster at this and that, the fact that it's not free makes it a dead end. Sun's not an evil company today, but they can become one tomorrow. Why would I put my work in their hands when I can own it myself?
I used ogg audio to encode my music collection because I didn't have an mp3 encoder and I consider it a lucky break. It was easier to use krecord, audacity and abcde in Debian Woody than it was to get any kind of mp3 encoder. The files turned out to be smaller but of comparable quality to downloaded mp3's. I did it mostly so I would not have to worry about my dying phonograph player and saved out wav files before encoding. abcde worked great for my CDs and the collection, as you know, is much more convenient on a hard drive.
As for devices, having ogg forced me to get a Zaurus as a portable player. My handspring visor, though still useful, needed upgrading. Zaurus plays both ogg and mp3 from CF or MMC and does so without the annoying DRM problems most players have. So, my $250 investment in Zaurus served more than one function, though it might not be as nice and surely is not as rugged as dedicated players that now cater to ogg. Sharp promisses you can sync Zaurus to outlook as well as read Word Docs.
I'm not qualified to talk about video formats yet, but I have a feeling that I'm going to like theora.
The article must have been a troll. It recommends non-free software. It's counter intuitive and contrary to most people's experience and therefore technically dubious. That's rich, given the inflammatory page it points to complains that you can't trust Slashdot for technical content. The whole thing looks like a set up to make Slashdot look as bad as possible. Doug should know better and is therefore suspect.
Doug should be complaining about his TOS rather than the "Slashdot effect". Attention is what you get when you post material of technical merit onto the web. The "Slashdot Effect" is just another one of those facts of life we all have to live with, like hurricanes. TOS that don't deal with that possibility are screwing Doug, not Slashdot. This is one of those things that ISPs need to deal with. Every two bit data center on earth has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on off electric generating equipment, HVAC, and physical security. Responsible ISPs don't slap their users because other people launch a DoS attack on them. Yes, 99% of the dreaded Slashdot attack is a DoS attack generated by people who don't like Slashdot. I doubt that escaped Doug's notice.
The quit slashdot site is flame bait hardly worthy of a reply. Slashdot does cull it's stories well and there is usefull information to be had reading the blurbs. Yes, the comments have been run over by determined and well organized trolls. It's been more than a year since I've been given mod points. I could care less. I have fun here anyway and the exercise keeps my writing skills sharp. Yep, my GRE verbal and writing sample were top decile. This is not a service I get from passive news feeds by supposed "experts" and industry shills that generally follow Slashdot by a week or more. Eat me trolls. Am I rabid and foaming at the mouth over it? Hell no. I could care less about insults delivered by people I don't know and I get to shout it all out here.
Twitter is laughing all the way to his next 16 ounce curl at this latest nasty attack on his favorite news service.
there is no phone.
You can say that about any web site. This site has the advantage that he's hosting it himself and can put hundreds of gigabytes worth of content up. With all that space, he can make his site very interesting without having to pay an arm and a leg to a hosting provider. I think that's what he means by BBS community spirit, doing it yourself and having lots of interesting stuff.
I imagine that the only reason he's blocking "internet" access trough his wireless is to avoid angering his ISP. It will be impossible, and foolish, for him to keep his content from pointing to the outside world. Most of the people who connect to his network are going to also have internet access and have it while they are browsing his pages.
It will also be difficult to keep his content off the internet itself. Someone who's not worried about angering their ISP and our hero could forward ports and serve the whole thing up to the internet at large while making it look like all the traffic was going to a local wireless connection. Anyone know a way to tell the difference?
I'd set up a single machine ad hock and give it a static IP. He could also set up a WAP and have this machine hooked into an ethernet port on the back and that would be easier. I'd run Debian because that's what I know. He could set up http, anonymous ftp and shell accounts. He'd have to advertise it on the web or with a handbill. Colliding with other WAPs might get messy.
You really think Microsoft is going to throw all of their resources into one thing?
OK, there really are two things they spend money on, acquisitions and advertising. Acquisitions includes DRM. Trolling Slashdot is part of their advertising effort. Enron had piles of money too. Too bad M$ has not used it's supposedly vast resources to fix, much less improve it's third rate browser in the last two years. How's that for a clue?
Yes, but things don't always go that way before 1.0. In general odd numbered releases are for new features and are not as stable as even numbered releases. I'm not sure if the Mozilla people follow all of those rules or not, but it's good to let current firebird users know that they won't be punished for moving up.
I've read this one enough now to want to pop it. Companies like Dell, HP and others might want to tweak their customer's machines with this or Mozilla itself as a default browser. While this is hard to do, it can be done and vendors looking for a competitive edge in a world of look and work alike machines might make the move. They have already started to sell machines with Linux on them and that proves that the anti-trust bust has had some small liberating effect on big dumb vendors.
When someone tells me that the local Cable company does not "support" anything but Outlook Express on M$, I tell them that people who don't use that program or that platform don't need a tenth of the support.
What, like reviving their superior version of IE for Mac or porting some of the features to Winblows? Fat chance.
Microsoft is putting all of it's efforts into "security". That is DRM, code signing and BIOS efforts that will lock out competition. Their idea of competing it to break the competitor. If they were interested in improvements, they could have fixed some of the longstanding bugs that have been used recently to blow up systems.
A better question is what parts are really Microsoft's. A short list of software bought either up front or through court imposed fines includes; Their browser, Backup software, Defrag software, just about everything. They even got notepad from ATT.
They have added to the code and packaged it, but companies like Red Hat do that much and more.
Microsoft's publicly stated software growth model is to wait until a market is "mature" then buy their way into it. They call people who make new things, "loss leaders". This works well when you want to take money from investors. It's no big deal, except they continue to also portray themselves to the public as "innovators" instead of what they are, a software vendor.
There are more people contributing to _____ than actually Care or Can do anyting about it
Is it:
???? any other non-hyped means of expression or group effort? How can someone running a web page like your own say such a thing?
Blogs are web pages for people who don't have the knowhow to get a site hosted and built. They can and are authored by people who know about other things, like riding a bike. Why slam them as empty expression because they might not be able to present it as nicely as you do? Would you be bothered if Brad or Jimmy got themselves a blog?
Sokol could have been more diplomatic and clear. He's not dissing users, he is dissing reviewers. There's a big difference.
In any case, what's really to complain about? Gnome is free software. If you don't like it, fix it or don't use it. If the developers of Gnome have been good to you in the past but are now running down a path that you don't like? Just be happy for the good things they did for you.
I don't understand the bile and anger that the Gnome team is getting for doing what all free software should. Free software is a DIY thing. Gnome developers think what they are doing is what newbies want. That's their business and you, as a power user, should know several alternatives to make yourself happy. If Gnome is broken, you get to keep all the pieces.
By that logic, I'd have to call Windoze and OS X BSD.
Distribution names are appropriate and easy to explain. Windows itself is a commercial distribution of software, a collection of stuff they have bought, coppied from BSD and written themselves. Newbies can understand that and they can understand that a GNU/Linux distribution is just another collection of software that happens to be free. It's an easy concept to transfer except you can promise the newbie that free software will remain free and tell them how they can share it with others. More importantly, the newbie needs to know the distribution name so they can look for help when they need it. The list is not endless, the newbie only needs to know about one or two distributions that meet their needs. This leads to much less confusion than gross simplifications like, this is all "Linux".
In any case this thread is about a new Wiki service where you can write about things that confuse newbies if you care. When you get there, you will see that the information they are looking for is specific to applications and distributions. It will be very helpful to developers of the applications and to documentation writers. If you have gripes about real problems, get going.
Knoppix and friends autoconfigure these things. Distros like Mepis install those settings to the newbie's hard drive with a few GUI clicks. Other distros like Red Hat and Mandrake have done this for years, but Mepis gives you the chance to try it out off the CD without risk to the newbie.
In any case, the point of the project is collect specific information about specific applications, so that developers can change their manuals or programs if they are inclined. If you think a control panel is lacking, by all means, write in. Be sure to include specific details of what confused you. If you think this is too much trouble to go through, ask yourelf what commercial vendor listens this way. Keep those thoughts in mind the next time you have a problem and you get stuck in the hardware - software blame shifting game played by most people who demand money for their services.
Movie theaters and other centers of idiotic greed have jamed cellphones and pagers. While I can admit that hearing cellphones go off in movie theaters is annoying, the problem rests with users not the phones. How would you like your doctor to not get a vibrating page because he was on call at a movie theater that blocked calls without notice? Interfering with licensed cell phone frequencies should earn such clueless people a stiff FCC fine. The public owns the spectrum, not the theater.
There was another case I remember, of a ball park that thought it could override the FCC and prevent people from setting up free wireless access within range of the park. They wanted to sell access to their "captive" audience. The mistake being made, once again, is that the landlord somehow owns the spectrum inside the park. They are wrong, the public owns the spectrum regardless of what the ball park tries to set up.
The airport is a brilliant place for greedheads to try to take ownership of the spectrum. Real and bogus safety concerns can be raised in such a technical environment. These concerns can easily be twisted into "property rights" propaganda. More importantly, there are multiple agencies who would claim to represent the public interest. If the greedheads work this right, they can leverage the effort of local, state and other federal agencies. They will all bombard the FCC and might even try to seize authority over the spectrum for themselves. It will make news and bullshit will spill forth into the minds of the public.
To get an idea of how backward this is, ask yourself what rights you have to the spectrum on your own property. Can you control the flow of radio waves into your own property? No, you have no right to demand that TV, radio and other broadcasters cease to transmit because you don't want their signal in your house. Nor can you charge them for a chicken wire Faraday cage. That's reasonable. (Unreasonable laws exist which attempting to prevent you from listening to some of the broadcasts and sharing your information about how to do so.) Broadcasters include people with cell phones and wifi adapters.
Blocking broadcasts will cause great economic harm for the benefit of a few operators. Regulation in this spirit will thwart any kind of mesh network building and preserve the obsolete natural monopoly enjoyed by incumbent telco providers. The most perverse aspect of this is that "property owners" may be convinced to go this way by the promise of profit from subscription wifi. What are the chances that profits from wifi and other wanna be telco services will ever be greater than the savings of simple co-operation and mesh networking?
So there are only 2 options? Make it hard for newbies or make it hard for regular users?
No, I said that there were users who will like this. I'm not sure where you get the above from that. If you don't like it, fix it or leave it alone. To read all the negative comments, you would think that Gnome is impossible for anyone to use and that's a crock of shit.
I prefer KDE, myself but the level of flamage over one dinky feature is way overblown. Gnome has great packages like Evolution and people should not be scared off of it because of one correctable file browser annoyance that some people I know will like.
Most installation programs for Windows give you the choice of the default install or the custom install and I've never heard anyone complain that the choice was too hard to make.
And most distributions include things like KDM which let you select what window manager you want to use and each window manager reads each user's preference files and remembers exactly what each user wants. If you want, you can modify the skeleton files and each new user will get the kind of behavior you want them to have. What are you getting at?