Math is beautiful. Studdied for itself, without pressure, it can be both diverting and practical. Geometric proofs are very satisfying and set the stage for more thought.
If I were you, I'd tutor my daughter first. See if you can keep up with her! It won't be easy, because any school pushes hard. Don't be discouraged, but realize that your memory fades and you have to push a little to get a coherent body of information in you mind all at once to see the interrelationships. You have two advantages over your daughter: you have seen the material before and you can concentrate on it alone.
The next step, if you don't have time for night class, is to find a peer who is reviewing for some kind of test. An engineer studying for the Engineer in Training Exam (EIT, formerly FE) will be boning up on all sorts of practical tricks. This will be less than satisfying, but it can establish a relationship that works in the future. Who knows, you might find someone who just wants to study. Teaching others is what graduate students are forced to do. It's a great way to learn becuase the holes in your knowledge stand out sharply when you try to explain things to others =:] This is probably the best means you have to expand your knowledge in the short term.
If you decide to go it alone, and you can do this, try to follow a college course. Go to any university web page and get the course curriculum that interests you. Then find out what the professor recomends for the course where you are. If it's not on a web page, go to their bookstore and see what book is on the shelf. It's generally the best, and at least represents much careful thought. Try to follow the class sylabus. The pace is usualy challenging and involves much homework every night! If you are interested in engineering math, I strongly recomend the CRC Math Handbook as general reference and the appropriate Schwam's Outline for the course you try.
Earning an ordinary undergraduate degree while working takes an effort few people are willing to make. You will be forced to study stuff you don't like under people you like even less. Imagine your least favorite grade school English teacher and give them ten times the power over your future. If you are willing to risk poverty, divorce and great disatisfaction you could quit your job. Don't expect to finish in less than four years. If you keep your job, don't expect to finish in less than eight. If you push too hard you will end up loathing the very thing that now entertains you. All that said, people have done it and done very well.
You can usually find the skeptics in law journals rather than at tech conferences.
What a troll article. Proclaiming that people who may or may not have mastered a word processor are going to interpret the laws for us? The article touches on no specifics but flames away at computer users as ingnorant adlolesents. Would that be the "generation gap" troll? The "sceptics" no more exits outside the author's imagination than the blind straw men he creates to oppose them.
Those treatened by the internet revolution will continue to spew bullshit like this. Those who will loose their ability to charge per minute for telcom will flame. Those who will loose their dead tree advertising empires will flame. Software companies with no real assets beside IP that has been duplicated, bettered and finally given away by the internet enabled free software community will flame. Those who would take something as common as music from the world, and attempt to monopolize it's distribution, really the sale of your own popular culture, will flame. And they are doing it. There is a steady barrage of hostile garbage comming from all those threatened industries. Attacks on sharing, free speech, even knowledge itself are becoming so common. All the storries about evil loosers who persue strange things and end up hurting themselves by being put in jail. The whole "internet bubble", where the internet is blamed for the recent collapse of so many companies that were pilfered by their executives with the aid of their accountants and sold by Wall Street, backers all of the old empires revealed as frauds are attempting to pass the blame from their wanton acts to the victims of their crimes. "Silly people, did you think stocks in our companies were really worth anything?" the seem to ask. All they will have in the end are losses. Obsolete business models will fail and those who fight against changes will have only themselves to blame for their losses.
Sensible people will apply reasonable laws to the internet and all forms of electronic communications. Laws made for snail mail will be appleid to email that will be encrypted and then protected from interception. New interests will find a way to right.laws have become unbalenced through oligrachal domination, Copyright will be rexeamined from it's first priniples bases on the greatly reduced cost of publication. The results will be much more in line with original US copyright laws than those that the RIAA would burden us with. Reasonable laws will be made, barring civil and nuclear war and everyone becoming like Microsoft.
Oh yeah, for those pea brains who would like to call me a strary eyed school girl I'm gonna pop out my accademic stick: BA Classics, BS Mechanical Engineering, working on a masters degree in Nuclear Science. I have a keen sense of history, love the good things that technology can do for people, I vote republican for lack of better alternatives, and I think the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Freedom Foundation are right on. Now piss off, you silly comercial trolls.
Which public resource would that be? The DSL line that I pay for? The privately owned long-haul fiber? The newspaper's servers? The reporter's time? Last I checked, none of those was a public resource. But hey, if you want to make your hardware, bandwidth, time, or money a public resource, be my guest.
The public resource would be the right of way all those corps utilize to run their "private" cables and fibers. Using that public space is a privalidge not a right and it entails responsiblities.
I have a public ftp site that I make available to my friends.
Adverts take up space that could be occupied by real content. I generally avoid sites that have too much of it and block the rest. Still, I have little choice about where M$ decides to send it's hords of slaves.
I expect most advert backed sevices to tank, unless some evil oligarchy gains control of the internet and turns it into an inferior version of cable TV. Ut-oh, looks like that is happening. The last laugh will be had by folks like me. As the oligarchy makes the net suck, Joe Sixpacks will leave it high and dry. I'll get completely out of it with some combination of wireless or optical. Greedy pigs can't stop the information revolution that's just gotten started.
We all read an article from The Hartford Courant which complained about this looser: The growing flood of e-mail advertising has crashed Internet servers, clogged connections and cost business untold hours of wasted employee time. It has also forced millions of bleary-eyed Internet users to undertake the seemingly endless chore of clearing the electronic clutter from their in-box.
I've yet to see any of us complain about the pop under and other adverts served up along with the ignorant and self rightous article. All forms of advertising on the net represent an abuse of a public resource and undermine it's pull nature. Mozilla refuses to download most of the offensive images, but 90% of home computer users cluelessly suck up all that crap with IE. That crap gets in the way of my email, ssh and sites I want to look at.
its far more likely that the TWAIN drivers you installed for your Epson camera corrupted the TWAIN drivers for your Cannon.
The camera software screwed up the scanner software. I did try to reinstall the scanner software, but it just broke the camera software without repairing the scanner functionality. It seems obvious that the camera changed out all sorts of dlls and what not that only marginally had anything to do with the camera itself. The scanner software, being much older, was more honest and assumed that M$ softare would be at the other side of API calls.
In any case, the result is the same. I lost functionality, and picture formats were drastically changed. Bit maps produced by the crappy M$ imaging program don't even work with Pain Brush. Go figure, they broke bitmaps. Did the camera software change out the imaging program itself, hmmm I can check.
--quick ssh into wife's computer --
find imaging is kodakimg.exe from may 11 1998.
This is useless info. There is no telling what dlls are called without much more work. The twain dlls are all from 1997, but of course there are a couple from 2000 and 2001, and the Program Files for my devices have their own way of doing things. Like I said, the method is not as important as the result and the demonstration of that result.
Furthermore, the patch that disables the program will "will be automatically downloaded onto your computer," without your knowledge.
The "patch" can come on a CD too. All you have to do is buy a camera and install it's drivers. ActiveX and what_not.dll will be replaced by the DRM versions. Since I purchased an Epson Digital Elph (an excellent camera and worth every penny spent) Paint Shop Pro can no longer take scans from my Cannon flatbed scanner. Now only the M$ scanning program can. Moreover, the tiff and bmp images that scanner makes are corrupt and won't open in Paint Shop Pro or win32 GIMP or most of my Linux image manipulators. Only Electric Eyes ignores the error and is able to liberate my scans. So you see, my carefully gaurded 98 machine that never sees the net was damaged by new M$ tricks despite my caution.
M$ is evil. They wish to redifine free as "without reward."
One day, I'll understand how to work my camera and scanner without M$ help and the VFAT partition will go away.
If you're in a large company and individual users have the rights/permissions to install software/patches on their machines -- short your own stock, you're in more trouble than just a EULA.:)
That would be any company with M$ encumbered hardware. At my company, M$, Norton, and a host of other "screen saver" shiny display companies take turns in the great zero privacy gang bang of our desktops. Some of it is initiated by users, others came as default enablers, NetMeeting, IE, Outlook, MediaPlayer. Our computers are so full of spies reporting to so many masters, I sometimes wonder if Bill Gates is intersted in Solitair scores.
If you had said this two weeks ago, I'd have called you a prophet. As it is everyone is short selling everything because the "new economy", where no physical good are made and shipped to the rest of the world, is a lie. DRM is more that invasive, it's a bad bet.
Plant a trojan in every copy, set to go off years from now. When the magic date hits, start sending state secrets to U.S. on one hand, while opening up a tunnel around their firewall blocks and blast every normal computer user in the country with a real look at the outside world of news, events -- and boobies!
Huh. I imagine that the people's republic is encouraged by the new "security" model of Palladrone and all of it's great people management potential. Someone in the party might have had second thoughts about this compiler and freedom thing from Linux. Of course the party does not trust M$ and will keep any information from getting out of the country if they can. China does NOT want free comunications, nor does Microsoft, as demonstrated by their EULA.
So would any software that doesn't run the JavaScript (i.e. Mozilla with popups disabled), etc. etc.
How about browsers that don't have active X, flash, and other trash? Will they outlaw my lynx? The step is larger than you think, but no less likely. I can hear the microturds now, "you must display copyright material exactly as intended or you are stealing." DRM becomes more oppresive all the time.
I assume they scan your eyes first time, and it stays in their database forever. It'd be rather useless if they scanned you, then got rid of the record, since the point is to let trusted passengers go through.
The point is to stop people who are known to NOT be trusted. Retinal scans are as accurate as finger print scans for the same reasons. The problem is that contacts can do to this what edible fake fingertips did for figerprint scans.
While the upside is dubious the downside is certian. Retinal scans enable accurate automated tracking of individuals anywhere cameras are.
Just when you thout it was bad when NPR charged money for transcripts of Public Radio. At least I took offense to being offered the opertunity to buy words I had paid for.
...their board of directors is made up of their several hundred member stations
They will need every one them to read all the comments being mailed to them. I posted mine on the comments section of their link request page =:> Hopefully, they will listen. They depend on public good will to fund their broadcasts into every corner of these United States. One or two elections could bring down the voice of big brother.
No longer must we verbally assault strangers via the Internet, now we may physically assualt them in person. Thanks Slashdot.
The verbal assaults from the likes of Jerzy Junks, Mister Blister, and other trolls are a recent thing. If you look back two or three years, you won't find them. I doubt the six or seven M$ employees who actually post that kind of crap will show up anywhere. Those that do show up will be the mellow and stuborn folks that refuse to leave despite all the noise.
Thank you, ffatTony, for providing an excellent demonstration of a sensless, negative and non constructive comment.
...we're not going to convince members of governments on technical merits.
Really? The government hires IT people and it listens to them. It's their duty to recomend the best, least expensive solutions and prove it technically. I'd say that should have things moving quickly. As Windoze dies on old government computers it's GNU to the rescue. As industry moves this way more studies with more numbers will be available to prove their point.
It will be impossible to de-throne MS until someone comes up with a compelling new service or feature that MS doesn't and/or can't immediately offer. I don't know if that's even possible.
Cheer up, there are plenty of services and features that M$ will never offer. As their current marketing model requires them to be root on your machine, security and privacy and all the best practices to achieve them will never be implemented on an M$ encumbered computer. Witness the lack of real user accounts, embeded file premisions and the XP EULA which gives M$ the right to "upgrade" components at will and inspect for copyright infringing material. My my my, what can you do?
As Anderson pointed out, the browser wars were won when M$ made their browser the default and forbade their vendors from including Netscape. Predatory behavior, there is no doubt that the computing industry as a whole has suffered tremendous losses and we are all much poorer from it. Today slashdot has an article about VOIP phones. Six years ago I saw things like that run under windows 3.1, used by a fellow LSU graduate student who used a simple microphone and speaker set up to talk to his family in Finland. Why is it that such things are not common today? Could it be because M$ was bussy denying such services while they got together their goofey NetMeeting program which leaves the micrphone and camera on by default? Way to to!
If the downsides of M$ software are not enough to switch you over to free software, free software's performance will be. That's the good news. There's a whole universe of great software out there that can be had for little or no cost that beats the crap out of M$ junk.
OK, Netscape was cool, Mozilla rocks, and IE sucks. Subjective, no? Some people sleep on beds of nails and like it, what do I know about their taste in browsers. I like Mozilla's cookie manager, ability to ignore pictures from specific sites (like ads.doubleclick.net), and many other features. At work, IE lacks all of these things and browsing is painful. It's hard to tell what the Verizon Guy likes because he does little more than bad mouth others and make inflamitory posts. His main point, that IE won the browser wars on merrit is pure fantasy. We can, pull a few more glaring trollish statements out of the stinking mess
1) A better browser than Netscape 2) Free as in beer
IE was integrated with win95B against court order and vendors were prevented from installing Netscape at that time. So technically, it's true, IE's rise started before 98. That is was because of anti-competitive practices has not only been proven in court, it's intuitively obvious.
He claims that Netscape 4.x was and is slow and unstable. My experience is different.
There's more, but it's not really worth digging into. Anyone who's used Mozilla, even a Win32 impared version, and IE knows which one is easier to use and better for the user. I'm happy to point out the other silly things that Verizon Guy has said before. It just goes to show the kind of person who posts IE is great trash every time a story mentions the Netscape. Roads should have signposts, dangerous materials, warning lables, but trolls leave their own posts as warnings.
Verizon Guy says, IE rocks, Netscape sucks, then takes swing at Larry Ellison. Looks like flame bait to me, but that's nothing new from the Verizon Guy.
here he distracts the reader's amusment from M$ including actual viruses on their CDs with a swipe at BIND. here he tells us Lindows is second rate. here is a real gem, where he calls free software advocates stupid, retarded and pubic hairless. Nice. here we have a pure flame that was moderated well.
Well, there you have it, a typical M$ loudmouth. The man must mod himself.
The problem is that most people don't know what a browser is. My secretary sure doesn't. I'm not sure she even knows what the Internet is beyond some vague notions that it's "out there" somewhere, and that she gets to it whenever she double-clicks the shortcuts I set up on her computer.
That's not a problem, it's the solution. The next computer they get has Red Hat on it with KDE desktio default. As long as they can read their old work, surf, email and isntant message, they will be as happy as they ever were. As Andersen pointed out, the biggest factor is what browser comes with the computer.
The problem comes when you have people who have spent way too much time with Word docs and other little endless mazes M$ makes. Their work will be next to impossible to get out of their current computer, even into the latest and greatest M$ cruft. These people also resent it when all of their little shortcuts and lefthand clicks are replaced and they have to learn something different. These people can be helpful once they've lived through one or two M$ upgrades with all the loss of work. They learn, slowly, but they learn just like the rest of us have. Still, you have to get all thier junk out. Macros, VB, shudder.
People will be much easier to move in the future. Remember that it's only been a few years since PCs took everything over. What is it, 60% of PCs still have Windows 98 on them? What this means is that most people have never suffered a real M$ upgrade. After one of those, you can swap out everthing and make them just as happy as anyone.
We're all going to have to get used to working with a lot less bandwidth, and paying for our fair share. Unlimited flat-rate broadband was untenable. It should have been this way from the beginning.
Sure, and that green revolution thingy that's got us all well fed? Forget it. We are all going to have to learn to live with less food. Electricity? You must be insane, did you think you could escape drudgery forever? Get your back back into your chores and wax smog in your lungs. Internal combustion? What are you some kind of future radicalist? Horses are more than enogh for those who really need to move around. We could never expect technology to raise our standard of living or provide new things we never thought of, could we?
The cable market is in a crunch right now because they didn't charge enough for their flatrate. Because they're a monopoly, they may be able to get away with charging per use like electricity, but that's only because also like electric companies,
Crap on both counts. The cable companies are in a crunch because people are not signing up in droves for their new service. The reasons for this have more to do with M$ degraded computer perfomrance, hence low sales, and RIAA backed destruction of new media outlets that made the internet something desirable to average people. Between those two and other large publishers, the average PC can do little more than a Win3.1 PC could TEN years ago. Name one thing a M$ encumbered machine can do today that it could not then. Innovation not legislation, thanks M$. The new price hikes will have even more people running from the great internet andvert push scam. Sorry, the Greed heads have wrecked this party, do you think people are going to continue comming?
Now for your silly compairison of the publically regulated electricty market to the far more encumbered "broadband" market. Where I live, I have one choice of provider. The local Bell is killing off all other DSL providers. When it's done I'll be able to chose between them and COX. Right now I can chose COX or dial up. My $65/month buys me a fixed IP that I can't serve anything from. I run ssh and ftp, and I can only imagine that somehow violates the unpublished unilaterally changeable EULA of the moment. For about the same amount a month, I get electricty that runs everything in my house. It runs my tools, washes my clothes and dishes, lights my nights, turns my computer fans, air conditions my air and does countless of other automated real physical things that make my wife and my life much easier than the life our parents even enjoyed. The price is strictly regulated by public boards who base the cost on a reasonable rate of return for the providers. I just happen to work in a nuclear power plant, so I can tell you that one five billion dollar facility is a bigger investment than any two bit cable gypsies could ever put together in their little hubs. It is one of many that keep the lights on. How can you even begin to compare the investments, costs and services?
Removing gopher will effect a very very small number of people, and probably no 3rd party software vendors. Removing HTML rendering AND HTTP support (which is what removing IE equals) would screw many many users and thousands of 3rd party software vendors who rely on this support from the OS, in in fact render the system unusable as too many components rely on this support, 3rd party and otherwise
Nope, try again. M$ could care less about other software, as you can tell by their conatantly changing print methods. The reason M$ claims that IE can't be removed is because they put it in EXACTLY the way they were forbiden to by the federal government: spagetti coded into the OS itself through innumerable DLLs with multiple undocumented and unrelated interfaces. This kind of code mixing, like passing disk access through the GUI, is one of the reasons M$ is so unstable. IE is always on because it recieves many unecessary function calls. What you get when you try to remove IE is a box that won't boot. I doubt even Bill Gates knows what you get when you leave it in, besides poorer.
While I'm not familiar with Toqueville's work, I can see a glaring contradiction when it's put in my face. Their mission statement is at odds with what this Ken Brown says, and even with the page itself.
The page was generated with Adobe Go Live, and the mission statement is an image or something else difficult to copy, so I had to type it by hand for your enjoyment.
Since 1988, the Alexis de Toqueville Institution has studied the spread and perfection of democracy around the world. I'm not impressed
In this we follow the principles of Toqueville himself...
At the root, perhaps, is a populist belief in the basic goodness, perfectibility, and nobility of mankind and of the human community....
Our principles guide the selection of which issues are critical to the advancement of freedom - but we don't rush to judgment about which means will be most effective in producing it.
I'm afraid that they have rushed to judgment and condemned one of the most important documents protecting freedom of speech today. The GPL is the only document that insures that you will have control of your computer and therefore your publications will not be censored at the source. It does this by insuring that the possesor of GPL code will always have the ability to use, understand, modify and distribute that code as they see fit without reducing the rights of other users to do the same. Code that does not insure this right has all of the security flaws and fears raised in Ken Browns paper as the owner does not know what the machine is doing or have the ability to change it. ADTI completely misses the point and condemn the GPL because they fear it can not be comercialized in the conventional fashion and many other incorrect and confused reasons. This is a shame because there is nothing more important for "democracy" and freedom than the free exchange of information the GPL ultimately protects.
The greatest contradiction is seems to be their main reason for rejecting the GPL as a license worth using: that volunteer efforts can not match commercial ones, and that the GPL community of volunteers is a myth. Well, I'm sitting here with my mythical OS, typing into a mythical text editor, for a mythical browser. All are far better than commercial alternatives. All were developed and rely on tools created by volunteers and others who really do believe in the goodness and freedoms of their users. No one who has respect for his neighbor would ever say that people could not co-operate without a profit motive, but this is what Ken concludes,
...Removing the economic incentive for firms to own the rights to products spawned from research and development programs is the surest way to end their existence... the [Greatest risk of the GPL] is its threat to the cooperation between different parties who collaborate and create new technologies.
What utter hogwash. The GPL enables all to participate in the development of new technology and removes many artificial barriers. The fruit of all the mentioned government programs has been brought to me in a form I can manipulate by Debian. The number of sound scientific programs I now have access to, through GNU compilers, is uncountable. There are few academic publishers who would have it any other way, they exist to teach and promote their various specialties. To top it off, large companies will continue to pour money into the exploitation of these technologies because it is in their best financial interest. So much the better if that means their derivative works will be available to me as well. How can anyone intellectually honest say otherwise, especially while espousing freedom and the goodness of man?
Oh, enough. The more I read of this MicroSoft parrot's garbage, the angrier I get. Especially unkind and untrue is the assertion that RMS is a "fallen hero" viewed as radical. I respect that man more every day. Ken Brown, you are a 1/4 watt bulb.
an increasing number of retail merchants, from Starbucks to fast-food chains and 7-Eleven, accept the Sony-made card. Still, getting around on the city's sprawling public transportation network accounts for over 90 percent of Octopus transactions.
Ha, ha, ha. How many five buck coffees do you think people are really going to buy?
If Sony makes the card, and the card is cash, is Sony a mint? Is anyone with a clever piece of plastic a mint? Banking Segfault, ahh! Can no longer distinguish between legal tender that are nothing more than tokens and prommisory notes, tokens for tokens, and digital promisory notes, tokens of tokens that simply change state instead of hands.
Now for something that has nothing to do with the price of tea in China or Octopussy, the famous Hong Kong Spy.
Condoms? Only sailors wear condoms, baby!
Not in the 90s, Austin.
Well, they ought to, the filthy beggers go from port to port.
[Obvious] In regards to the circled C...if they don't want people to be able to reproduce the guidelines, how the heck do they expect anybody to know what they are, much less follow them?
Ah! We come to the point of publishing and why publishing in formats that can only be "consumed" once are stupid. Witness Real and other "streaming" formats. Silly eh?
So why would anyone publish a proceedure, guidline, law or news in such a format? The memory hole won't work if people can save coppies of published works localy. Local copies must be discredited and only the official source recognized. It's about control, the foundation of their disrespect of your rights.
My comment was satircial, but the logic behind it is not. UM needs to consider copyright issues much more than they have.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were you, I'd tutor my daughter first. See if you can keep up with her! It won't be easy, because any school pushes hard. Don't be discouraged, but realize that your memory fades and you have to push a little to get a coherent body of information in you mind all at once to see the interrelationships. You have two advantages over your daughter: you have seen the material before and you can concentrate on it alone.
The next step, if you don't have time for night class, is to find a peer who is reviewing for some kind of test. An engineer studying for the Engineer in Training Exam (EIT, formerly FE) will be boning up on all sorts of practical tricks. This will be less than satisfying, but it can establish a relationship that works in the future. Who knows, you might find someone who just wants to study. Teaching others is what graduate students are forced to do. It's a great way to learn becuase the holes in your knowledge stand out sharply when you try to explain things to others =:] This is probably the best means you have to expand your knowledge in the short term.
If you decide to go it alone, and you can do this, try to follow a college course. Go to any university web page and get the course curriculum that interests you. Then find out what the professor recomends for the course where you are. If it's not on a web page, go to their bookstore and see what book is on the shelf. It's generally the best, and at least represents much careful thought. Try to follow the class sylabus. The pace is usualy challenging and involves much homework every night! If you are interested in engineering math, I strongly recomend the CRC Math Handbook as general reference and the appropriate Schwam's Outline for the course you try.
Earning an ordinary undergraduate degree while working takes an effort few people are willing to make. You will be forced to study stuff you don't like under people you like even less. Imagine your least favorite grade school English teacher and give them ten times the power over your future. If you are willing to risk poverty, divorce and great disatisfaction you could quit your job. Don't expect to finish in less than four years. If you keep your job, don't expect to finish in less than eight. If you push too hard you will end up loathing the very thing that now entertains you. All that said, people have done it and done very well.
What a troll article. Proclaiming that people who may or may not have mastered a word processor are going to interpret the laws for us? The article touches on no specifics but flames away at computer users as ingnorant adlolesents. Would that be the "generation gap" troll? The "sceptics" no more exits outside the author's imagination than the blind straw men he creates to oppose them.
Those treatened by the internet revolution will continue to spew bullshit like this. Those who will loose their ability to charge per minute for telcom will flame. Those who will loose their dead tree advertising empires will flame. Software companies with no real assets beside IP that has been duplicated, bettered and finally given away by the internet enabled free software community will flame. Those who would take something as common as music from the world, and attempt to monopolize it's distribution, really the sale of your own popular culture, will flame. And they are doing it. There is a steady barrage of hostile garbage comming from all those threatened industries. Attacks on sharing, free speech, even knowledge itself are becoming so common. All the storries about evil loosers who persue strange things and end up hurting themselves by being put in jail. The whole "internet bubble", where the internet is blamed for the recent collapse of so many companies that were pilfered by their executives with the aid of their accountants and sold by Wall Street, backers all of the old empires revealed as frauds are attempting to pass the blame from their wanton acts to the victims of their crimes. "Silly people, did you think stocks in our companies were really worth anything?" the seem to ask. All they will have in the end are losses. Obsolete business models will fail and those who fight against changes will have only themselves to blame for their losses.
Sensible people will apply reasonable laws to the internet and all forms of electronic communications. Laws made for snail mail will be appleid to email that will be encrypted and then protected from interception. New interests will find a way to right.laws have become unbalenced through oligrachal domination, Copyright will be rexeamined from it's first priniples bases on the greatly reduced cost of publication. The results will be much more in line with original US copyright laws than those that the RIAA would burden us with. Reasonable laws will be made, barring civil and nuclear war and everyone becoming like Microsoft.
Oh yeah, for those pea brains who would like to call me a strary eyed school girl I'm gonna pop out my accademic stick: BA Classics, BS Mechanical Engineering, working on a masters degree in Nuclear Science. I have a keen sense of history, love the good things that technology can do for people, I vote republican for lack of better alternatives, and I think the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Freedom Foundation are right on. Now piss off, you silly comercial trolls.
The public resource would be the right of way all those corps utilize to run their "private" cables and fibers. Using that public space is a privalidge not a right and it entails responsiblities.
I have a public ftp site that I make available to my friends.
Adverts take up space that could be occupied by real content. I generally avoid sites that have too much of it and block the rest. Still, I have little choice about where M$ decides to send it's hords of slaves.
I expect most advert backed sevices to tank, unless some evil oligarchy gains control of the internet and turns it into an inferior version of cable TV. Ut-oh, looks like that is happening. The last laugh will be had by folks like me. As the oligarchy makes the net suck, Joe Sixpacks will leave it high and dry. I'll get completely out of it with some combination of wireless or optical. Greedy pigs can't stop the information revolution that's just gotten started.
The growing flood of e-mail advertising has crashed Internet servers, clogged connections and cost business untold hours of wasted employee time. It has also forced millions of bleary-eyed Internet users to undertake the seemingly endless chore of clearing the electronic clutter from their in-box.
I've yet to see any of us complain about the pop under and other adverts served up along with the ignorant and self rightous article. All forms of advertising on the net represent an abuse of a public resource and undermine it's pull nature. Mozilla refuses to download most of the offensive images, but 90% of home computer users cluelessly suck up all that crap with IE. That crap gets in the way of my email, ssh and sites I want to look at.
The camera software screwed up the scanner software. I did try to reinstall the scanner software, but it just broke the camera software without repairing the scanner functionality. It seems obvious that the camera changed out all sorts of dlls and what not that only marginally had anything to do with the camera itself. The scanner software, being much older, was more honest and assumed that M$ softare would be at the other side of API calls.
In any case, the result is the same. I lost functionality, and picture formats were drastically changed. Bit maps produced by the crappy M$ imaging program don't even work with Pain Brush. Go figure, they broke bitmaps. Did the camera software change out the imaging program itself, hmmm I can check.
--quick ssh into wife's computer --
find imaging is kodakimg.exe from may 11 1998.
This is useless info. There is no telling what dlls are called without much more work. The twain dlls are all from 1997, but of course there are a couple from 2000 and 2001, and the Program Files for my devices have their own way of doing things. Like I said, the method is not as important as the result and the demonstration of that result.
The "patch" can come on a CD too. All you have to do is buy a camera and install it's drivers. ActiveX and what_not.dll will be replaced by the DRM versions. Since I purchased an Epson Digital Elph (an excellent camera and worth every penny spent) Paint Shop Pro can no longer take scans from my Cannon flatbed scanner. Now only the M$ scanning program can. Moreover, the tiff and bmp images that scanner makes are corrupt and won't open in Paint Shop Pro or win32 GIMP or most of my Linux image manipulators. Only Electric Eyes ignores the error and is able to liberate my scans. So you see, my carefully gaurded 98 machine that never sees the net was damaged by new M$ tricks despite my caution.
M$ is evil. They wish to redifine free as "without reward."
One day, I'll understand how to work my camera and scanner without M$ help and the VFAT partition will go away.
That would be any company with M$ encumbered hardware. At my company, M$, Norton, and a host of other "screen saver" shiny display companies take turns in the great zero privacy gang bang of our desktops. Some of it is initiated by users, others came as default enablers, NetMeeting, IE, Outlook, MediaPlayer. Our computers are so full of spies reporting to so many masters, I sometimes wonder if Bill Gates is intersted in Solitair scores.
If you had said this two weeks ago, I'd have called you a prophet. As it is everyone is short selling everything because the "new economy", where no physical good are made and shipped to the rest of the world, is a lie. DRM is more that invasive, it's a bad bet.
Efficiency, privacy and security proven in Communist China.
Marks, Mao, Gates, heros of the revolution.
Useful where free press is forbiden.
Making our enimies less productive every day.
Perfered by colective oligarchies 10 to 1.
You don't want to know what happens when you violate the EULA.
BSA, PRC, we taught them everything they know.
People who can only have one child won't mind the copy protection at all.
Huh. I imagine that the people's republic is encouraged by the new "security" model of Palladrone and all of it's great people management potential. Someone in the party might have had second thoughts about this compiler and freedom thing from Linux. Of course the party does not trust M$ and will keep any information from getting out of the country if they can. China does NOT want free comunications, nor does Microsoft, as demonstrated by their EULA.
Porn is a standard component of prolefeed.
How about browsers that don't have active X, flash, and other trash? Will they outlaw my lynx? The step is larger than you think, but no less likely. I can hear the microturds now, "you must display copyright material exactly as intended or you are stealing." DRM becomes more oppresive all the time.
Why not just fix the problem with Debian? You know M$ will build paths around Lavasoft and others.
The point is to stop people who are known to NOT be trusted. Retinal scans are as accurate as finger print scans for the same reasons. The problem is that contacts can do to this what edible fake fingertips did for figerprint scans.
While the upside is dubious the downside is certian. Retinal scans enable accurate automated tracking of individuals anywhere cameras are.
They will need every one them to read all the comments being mailed to them. I posted mine on the comments section of their link request page =:> Hopefully, they will listen. They depend on public good will to fund their broadcasts into every corner of these United States. One or two elections could bring down the voice of big brother.
The verbal assaults from the likes of Jerzy Junks, Mister Blister, and other trolls are a recent thing. If you look back two or three years, you won't find them. I doubt the six or seven M$ employees who actually post that kind of crap will show up anywhere. Those that do show up will be the mellow and stuborn folks that refuse to leave despite all the noise.
Thank you, ffatTony, for providing an excellent demonstration of a sensless, negative and non constructive comment.
Really? The government hires IT people and it listens to them. It's their duty to recomend the best, least expensive solutions and prove it technically. I'd say that should have things moving quickly. As Windoze dies on old government computers it's GNU to the rescue. As industry moves this way more studies with more numbers will be available to prove their point.
Cheer up, there are plenty of services and features that M$ will never offer. As their current marketing model requires them to be root on your machine, security and privacy and all the best practices to achieve them will never be implemented on an M$ encumbered computer. Witness the lack of real user accounts, embeded file premisions and the XP EULA which gives M$ the right to "upgrade" components at will and inspect for copyright infringing material. My my my, what can you do?
As Anderson pointed out, the browser wars were won when M$ made their browser the default and forbade their vendors from including Netscape. Predatory behavior, there is no doubt that the computing industry as a whole has suffered tremendous losses and we are all much poorer from it. Today slashdot has an article about VOIP phones. Six years ago I saw things like that run under windows 3.1, used by a fellow LSU graduate student who used a simple microphone and speaker set up to talk to his family in Finland. Why is it that such things are not common today? Could it be because M$ was bussy denying such services while they got together their goofey NetMeeting program which leaves the micrphone and camera on by default? Way to to!
If the downsides of M$ software are not enough to switch you over to free software, free software's performance will be. That's the good news. There's a whole universe of great software out there that can be had for little or no cost that beats the crap out of M$ junk.
1) A better browser than Netscape
2) Free as in beer
IE was integrated with win95B against court order and vendors were prevented from installing Netscape at that time. So technically, it's true, IE's rise started before 98. That is was because of anti-competitive practices has not only been proven in court, it's intuitively obvious.
He claims that Netscape 4.x was and is slow and unstable. My experience is different.
There's more, but it's not really worth digging into. Anyone who's used Mozilla, even a Win32 impared version, and IE knows which one is easier to use and better for the user. I'm happy to point out the other silly things that Verizon Guy has said before. It just goes to show the kind of person who posts IE is great trash every time a story mentions the Netscape. Roads should have signposts, dangerous materials, warning lables, but trolls leave their own posts as warnings.
here he distracts the reader's amusment from M$ including actual viruses on their CDs with a swipe at BIND.
here he tells us Lindows is second rate.
here is a real gem, where he calls free software advocates stupid, retarded and pubic hairless. Nice.
here we have a pure flame that was moderated well.
Well, there you have it, a typical M$ loudmouth. The man must mod himself.
That's not a problem, it's the solution. The next computer they get has Red Hat on it with KDE desktio default. As long as they can read their old work, surf, email and isntant message, they will be as happy as they ever were. As Andersen pointed out, the biggest factor is what browser comes with the computer.
The problem comes when you have people who have spent way too much time with Word docs and other little endless mazes M$ makes. Their work will be next to impossible to get out of their current computer, even into the latest and greatest M$ cruft. These people also resent it when all of their little shortcuts and lefthand clicks are replaced and they have to learn something different. These people can be helpful once they've lived through one or two M$ upgrades with all the loss of work. They learn, slowly, but they learn just like the rest of us have. Still, you have to get all thier junk out. Macros, VB, shudder.
People will be much easier to move in the future. Remember that it's only been a few years since PCs took everything over. What is it, 60% of PCs still have Windows 98 on them? What this means is that most people have never suffered a real M$ upgrade. After one of those, you can swap out everthing and make them just as happy as anyone.
Sure, and that green revolution thingy that's got us all well fed? Forget it. We are all going to have to learn to live with less food. Electricity? You must be insane, did you think you could escape drudgery forever? Get your back back into your chores and wax smog in your lungs. Internal combustion? What are you some kind of future radicalist? Horses are more than enogh for those who really need to move around. We could never expect technology to raise our standard of living or provide new things we never thought of, could we?
Crap on both counts. The cable companies are in a crunch because people are not signing up in droves for their new service. The reasons for this have more to do with M$ degraded computer perfomrance, hence low sales, and RIAA backed destruction of new media outlets that made the internet something desirable to average people. Between those two and other large publishers, the average PC can do little more than a Win3.1 PC could TEN years ago. Name one thing a M$ encumbered machine can do today that it could not then. Innovation not legislation, thanks M$. The new price hikes will have even more people running from the great internet andvert push scam. Sorry, the Greed heads have wrecked this party, do you think people are going to continue comming?
Now for your silly compairison of the publically regulated electricty market to the far more encumbered "broadband" market. Where I live, I have one choice of provider. The local Bell is killing off all other DSL providers. When it's done I'll be able to chose between them and COX. Right now I can chose COX or dial up. My $65/month buys me a fixed IP that I can't serve anything from. I run ssh and ftp, and I can only imagine that somehow violates the unpublished unilaterally changeable EULA of the moment. For about the same amount a month, I get electricty that runs everything in my house. It runs my tools, washes my clothes and dishes, lights my nights, turns my computer fans, air conditions my air and does countless of other automated real physical things that make my wife and my life much easier than the life our parents even enjoyed. The price is strictly regulated by public boards who base the cost on a reasonable rate of return for the providers. I just happen to work in a nuclear power plant, so I can tell you that one five billion dollar facility is a bigger investment than any two bit cable gypsies could ever put together in their little hubs. It is one of many that keep the lights on. How can you even begin to compare the investments, costs and services?
Pththth-tit -fffffff!
Removing HTML rendering AND HTTP support (which is what removing IE equals) would screw many many users and thousands of 3rd party software vendors who rely on this support from the OS, in in fact render the system unusable as too many components rely on this support, 3rd party and otherwise
Nope, try again. M$ could care less about other software, as you can tell by their conatantly changing print methods. The reason M$ claims that IE can't be removed is because they put it in EXACTLY the way they were forbiden to by the federal government: spagetti coded into the OS itself through innumerable DLLs with multiple undocumented and unrelated interfaces. This kind of code mixing, like passing disk access through the GUI, is one of the reasons M$ is so unstable. IE is always on because it recieves many unecessary function calls. What you get when you try to remove IE is a box that won't boot. I doubt even Bill Gates knows what you get when you leave it in, besides poorer.
The page was generated with Adobe Go Live, and the mission statement is an image or something else difficult to copy, so I had to type it by hand for your enjoyment.
Since 1988, the Alexis de Toqueville Institution has studied the spread and perfection of democracy around the world. I'm not impressed
In this we follow the principles of Toqueville himself...
At the root, perhaps, is a populist belief in the basic goodness, perfectibility, and nobility of mankind and of the human community....
Our principles guide the selection of which issues are critical to the advancement of freedom - but we don't rush to judgment about which means will be most effective in producing it.
I'm afraid that they have rushed to judgment and condemned one of the most important documents protecting freedom of speech today. The GPL is the only document that insures that you will have control of your computer and therefore your publications will not be censored at the source. It does this by insuring that the possesor of GPL code will always have the ability to use, understand, modify and distribute that code as they see fit without reducing the rights of other users to do the same. Code that does not insure this right has all of the security flaws and fears raised in Ken Browns paper as the owner does not know what the machine is doing or have the ability to change it. ADTI completely misses the point and condemn the GPL because they fear it can not be comercialized in the conventional fashion and many other incorrect and confused reasons. This is a shame because there is nothing more important for "democracy" and freedom than the free exchange of information the GPL ultimately protects.
The greatest contradiction is seems to be their main reason for rejecting the GPL as a license worth using: that volunteer efforts can not match commercial ones, and that the GPL community of volunteers is a myth. Well, I'm sitting here with my mythical OS, typing into a mythical text editor, for a mythical browser. All are far better than commercial alternatives. All were developed and rely on tools created by volunteers and others who really do believe in the goodness and freedoms of their users. No one who has respect for his neighbor would ever say that people could not co-operate without a profit motive, but this is what Ken concludes,
What utter hogwash. The GPL enables all to participate in the development of new technology and removes many artificial barriers. The fruit of all the mentioned government programs has been brought to me in a form I can manipulate by Debian. The number of sound scientific programs I now have access to, through GNU compilers, is uncountable. There are few academic publishers who would have it any other way, they exist to teach and promote their various specialties. To top it off, large companies will continue to pour money into the exploitation of these technologies because it is in their best financial interest. So much the better if that means their derivative works will be available to me as well. How can anyone intellectually honest say otherwise, especially while espousing freedom and the goodness of man?
Oh, enough. The more I read of this MicroSoft parrot's garbage, the angrier I get. Especially unkind and untrue is the assertion that RMS is a "fallen hero" viewed as radical. I respect that man more every day. Ken Brown, you are a 1/4 watt bulb.
Ha, ha, ha. How many five buck coffees do you think people are really going to buy?
If Sony makes the card, and the card is cash, is Sony a mint? Is anyone with a clever piece of plastic a mint? Banking Segfault, ahh! Can no longer distinguish between legal tender that are nothing more than tokens and prommisory notes, tokens for tokens, and digital promisory notes, tokens of tokens that simply change state instead of hands.
Now for something that has nothing to do with the price of tea in China or Octopussy, the famous Hong Kong Spy.
Condoms? Only sailors wear condoms, baby!
Not in the 90s, Austin.
Well, they ought to, the filthy beggers go from port to port.
Ah! We come to the point of publishing and why publishing in formats that can only be "consumed" once are stupid. Witness Real and other "streaming" formats. Silly eh?
So why would anyone publish a proceedure, guidline, law or news in such a format? The memory hole won't work if people can save coppies of published works localy. Local copies must be discredited and only the official source recognized. It's about control, the foundation of their disrespect of your rights.
My comment was satircial, but the logic behind it is not. UM needs to consider copyright issues much more than they have.