Yes, Microsoft is not a monopoly by the exact original definition. But the original definition is not used in that strict meaning anymore. That is because most countries try to stop giving companies a monopoly and the economies have changed.
But they are a de facto monopoly and that's the point everyone (not just slashdot readers) are talking about.
They have a market share of over 90% in the computer consumer os market. They always had competition not only from other vendors. But also by using unfair practices (and being clever) they succeeded to get this huge market share.
I am not bothered by the ads, but I am a subscriber (after using slashdot nearly since it started).
I just don't turn any ads off. I see them all and save the credits for some future value they give me for my subscription. So it's a win-win situation: slashdot gets my money AND shows the ads - I am not forced to spend my credits on something I don't care about (ads).
This doesn't change anything of the fact that a stupid (but humouros) patent got granted. It's not so much about the person getting the patent. The patent office is supposed to stop nonsense like this. Shows that anybody can more or less patent anything, which is absolutely against the idea of patents.
[...]protected by the police, and supported by the free press.
This is just complete bullshit. It is true that the right-wing extremists (they weren't really nazis by definition) didn't get stopped early enough by the police. But saying that the police protected them is just clearly wrong.
Saying that the free press supported them is such a complete nonsense that you would probably get sued because of this. There was a huge outcry throughout the country, throughout every newspaper (even the more nationalists ones, if you can call them that in comparison to say Sun in Britain). Huge demonstrations started, people got sacked, the police got stricter and the press was demanding more force against the right-wing people.
So, please stop just spreading this complete, insulting nonsense and check the facts next time.
Re:Some positive thoughts (just to be a rebel)
on
Slashdot IRC Forum
·
· Score: 1
*Applause* Finally somebody who sees the real story.
We've seen enough websites go down because advertising didn't pay their costs. So why do people think it's different for slashdot?
I can't understand the people who say that slashdot can't charge because it's not their content but the content of the comments. Well, if you rent a room to somebody to have a (huge) party, do you charge money? If you go to a LAN party with thousands of people. Do you have to pay? Of course you do. Even though the organisators are just organising the infrastructure and the content is not by them. It's normal in this case and only the annoying people complain about it. But when slashdot is charging some money for providing the infrastructure for us to discuss things, everybody cries and shouts.
This doesn't mean that I think the system is good; it certainly can be improved to be good (+5 comments get 100 page views free, submitter of story gets 1000 pages free, flatrate, etc.)
So people, please stop whining, shouting and complaining. Just because you got something for free (and you still get it for free with non-intrusive (IMHO) ads), doesn't mean this will go on forever. (I still remember when netaddress.com was advertising lifetime free email adresses. Well, mine was deleted because I didn't want to participate in their subscription system.)
Fact 1: The average world temperature is rising. So, yes, there is a global warming.
Fact 2: This happened a lot of times in the past (talking of million years) without human interaction (same for cooling down). Humans might make it faster, slower or have no great effect. There is no prove yet.
Fact 3: There are abundant theories about how this makes the world hotter and counter-theories about how this will make the world cooler (keyword: iceage).
Fact 4: Nobody knows. Everybody just has theories based on very little data compared to the complex working of world climate.
And "global warming is slowing down earth rotation" is complete bullcrap IMHO. How do you want to prove that with this little data (we all know the world is slowing down anyway).
Before this it always seemed to be a miracle of when and how the kernel evolves and why this Linus guy is doing the releases...;) (joke, Laugh Now!)
Re:Lindows ripping off the crapiest UI in the worl
on
Lindows Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
I really wish people would stop whining. "crappiest UI on the world", oh man, you haven't seen crappy UIs then.
Don't you realize that this is your opinion and nothing more? The Windows GUI gets copied because everyone learned how to use it. Doesn't mean it's good, but it also means anyone who used Windows can use the Windows-like UIs too.
When I started using Linux and X about 7 years ago coming from OS/2, it had fvwm and I spend at least a week to get it to work how I was used to (and I actually liked fvwm95 that came later). KDE or GNOME made this more or less obsolete. And if you want you can tweak it to whatever you think is "The Best UI" and please stop whinging on about how terrible it is in the default setup, because I bet 90 percent of the users are happy with that and don't want it different (because if they were unhappy, they would start a new "wonderful" GUI... like KDE was started because CDE was crap, ugly and expensive...and GNOME was started because KDE was using QT, C++ and was Windows-like).
Missing the point. We are not talking about how secure PINs are, we are talking about if a hand signature is more secure than a digital encrypted key on a card with PIN.
So, you say a hand signature that you probably show several times a day and that a lot of people know or can very easily get, is more secure than a card that has to be stolen plus a PIN that has to be sneaked out before? I don't think so.
It's only a matter of time before somebody signs something (or appears to), and then denies any involvment. Excuses (true or not) of "My card was stolen", "They made me tell them the key", "I don't know what you're talking about" will presumably be uttered (in german).
Hmmm... very strange argument. Why is that different to hand signatures then?
Same excuses the other way round (and as courts probably here them very often):
"My signature was faked." (Event though it looks the same)
"They made me sign it."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
uttered in any language.
It doesn't matter if it was done digital or analog. The legal situation isn't worse. It only got better, because you have more security features. It's quite easy to fake a hand signature, but it's nearly impossible to fake a digital signature...
What's scary is that someone thinks it's scary to be archiving public forums. This isn't Big Brother. Just imagine losing all the history contained in Linus' various Usenet posts.
You're missing the point here. Linus' various Usenet
posts are nothing compared to posts in
touchier newsgroups.
Searching for my father's name brought up this other relative,
who wrote about his girlfriend having been abused
as a teenager and what to do.
Not exactly the stuff I expect to find or what I
want to know, when I see him. Maybe archiving
newsgroups which aren't about sensitive topics
would prove your point more, but don't forget that there
are more newsgroups than comp.os.linux.*
It makes me nervous to find texts about people
having been abused and writing about it. And
that's by searching for their names and what
they've done technically the last years.
The Usenet was IMHO never as public as the web,
but had much more a private character, where people
could say what they only wanted to know certain
groups.
Just imagine, your name is well known (e.g. Linus Torvalds)
and suddenly someone who searches for it finds
texts you wanted to keep more or less private.
Twofish loopback encryption is a module to encrypt loopback devices "independent[ly] from the medium on which the filesystem is stored".
This is quite different to quite a lot of other methods. It allows to backup encrypted files to e.g. CDROM and still have them mountable from there. Works quite well.
I have a small distinction to point out: The terrorist money being frozen would have been spent on killing civilians. Those terrorists are active today. Nazi memorabilia are, for the most part, historical artifacts (like a civil war flag or a gun fired by Napoleon). It's not like the money from Nazi memorabilia would go towards funding a new Nazi party.
So, tell me, are there no neonazi terrorists out there today? Who are getting more people (and money!) by spreading hate literature and memorabilia? And they are actively fighting as well or at least preparing until they can hit e.g. the US government. I guess, that counts as active terrorism and is not something historical that doesn't affect today's life. Don't underestimate the power of extremists literature/symbols/rituals.
I hope people remember that there are not only muslim terrorists out there...
> The question asked for information about partitition schema, not file systems.
The headline was about partition types not partition schemes. And the question was about filesystems (which makes more sense than a question about partition types anyways).
(Does nobody even read the submissions anymore??)
Re:Does PCS *need* GPS for positional data?
on
GPS Meets PCS
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Due to the very precise time division multiplexing used with GSM, the distance you are from the base station you are currently subscribed can be gleaned down to a metre.
I really, really, really doubt this. The whole of Europe is trying to find out how to position yourself with mobile phones to get down to one metre precision. The solution of just using GSM with the cells information and distance information gets you in about 400 metres accuracy (depending of the density of cells etc.). Combine it with GPS, you can try to get it to 10 metres in ideal situations. Of course GPS doesn't help you much in cities like New York with their high buildings blocking the satellites signal and having multi path effects.
So, if this is really true, tell your telco to come to Europe and earn shit loads (actually Vodaphone is British)... Don't believe everything that companies say.
hmmm... this made me think. Running on Debian an security update is as easy as pie (as mentioned before a lot: apt-get update; apt-get upgrade).
But how about if something breaks? How do I "rollback" the patches to fix a broken system?
All I can think of is getting the older packages and installing them by hand. Granted, this has never ever happened to me, except in unstable dist, but it would be interesting to know if apt-get/debian/dpkg supports this easily.
I think this would be a cool feature for emergencies, because you never know...;)
I want this picture as my desktop background (linux of course). Maybe someone can make a better scan available? I read it in the c't today as well and found it quite amusing.
Slashdot Mirror
But they are a de facto monopoly and that's the point everyone (not just slashdot readers) are talking about.
They have a market share of over 90% in the computer consumer os market. They always had competition not only from other vendors. But also by using unfair practices (and being clever) they succeeded to get this huge market share.
Your arguments about or are just plain wrong.
I am not bothered by the ads, but I am a subscriber (after using slashdot nearly since it started).
I just don't turn any ads off. I see them all and save the credits for some future value they give me for my subscription. So it's a win-win situation: slashdot gets my money AND shows the ads - I am not forced to spend my credits on something I don't care about (ads).
I recommend doing the same to support slashdot.
That's like suing the phone company for listing a criminal in the phone book.
True. This wouldn't happen in the USA. It's like suing Napster for providing the infrastructure to share songs... oh wait... damn.
This doesn't change anything of the fact that a stupid (but humouros) patent got granted. It's not so much about the person getting the patent. The patent office is supposed to stop nonsense like this. Shows that anybody can more or less patent anything, which is absolutely against the idea of patents.
Same like MS took over the PC games market, right? Uh, haven't seen that yet...
[...]protected by the police, and supported by the free press.
This is just complete bullshit. It is true that the right-wing extremists (they weren't really nazis by definition) didn't get stopped early enough by the police. But saying that the police protected them is just clearly wrong.
Saying that the free press supported them is such a complete nonsense that you would probably get sued because of this. There was a huge outcry throughout the country, throughout every newspaper (even the more nationalists ones, if you can call them that in comparison to say Sun in Britain). Huge demonstrations started, people got sacked, the police got stricter and the press was demanding more force against the right-wing people.
So, please stop just spreading this complete, insulting nonsense and check the facts next time.
*Applause* Finally somebody who sees the real story.
We've seen enough websites go down because advertising didn't pay their costs. So why do people think it's different for slashdot?
I can't understand the people who say that slashdot can't charge because it's not their content but the content of the comments. Well, if you rent a room to somebody to have a (huge) party, do you charge money? If you go to a LAN party with thousands of people. Do you have to pay? Of course you do. Even though the organisators are just organising the infrastructure and the content is not by them. It's normal in this case and only the annoying people complain about it. But when slashdot is charging some money for providing the infrastructure for us to discuss things, everybody cries and shouts.
This doesn't mean that I think the system is good; it certainly can be improved to be good (+5 comments get 100 page views free, submitter of story gets 1000 pages free, flatrate, etc.)
So people, please stop whining, shouting and complaining. Just because you got something for free (and you still get it for free with non-intrusive (IMHO) ads), doesn't mean this will go on forever. (I still remember when netaddress.com was advertising lifetime free email adresses. Well, mine was deleted because I didn't want to participate in their subscription system.)
Come on people. Relax.
Fact 1: The average world temperature is rising. So, yes, there is a global warming.
Fact 2: This happened a lot of times in the past (talking of million years) without human interaction (same for cooling down). Humans might make it faster, slower or have no great effect. There is no prove yet.
Fact 3: There are abundant theories about how this makes the world hotter and counter-theories about how this will make the world cooler (keyword: iceage).
Fact 4: Nobody knows. Everybody just has theories based on very little data compared to the complex working of world climate.
And "global warming is slowing down earth rotation" is complete bullcrap IMHO. How do you want to prove that with this little data (we all know the world is slowing down anyway).
I like especially the new openness that's achieved with this.
;) (joke, Laugh Now!)
It's exciting to see what's being done to the kernel Right Now: ChangeSet Summaries for kernel 2.5
Before this it always seemed to be a miracle of when and how the kernel evolves and why this Linus guy is doing the releases...
I really wish people would stop whining. "crappiest UI on the world", oh man, you haven't seen crappy UIs then.
Don't you realize that this is your opinion and nothing more? The Windows GUI gets copied because everyone learned how to use it. Doesn't mean it's good, but it also means anyone who used Windows can use the Windows-like UIs too.
When I started using Linux and X about 7 years ago coming from OS/2, it had fvwm and I spend at least a week to get it to work how I was used to (and I actually liked fvwm95 that came later). KDE or GNOME made this more or less obsolete. And if you want you can tweak it to whatever you think is "The Best UI" and please stop whinging on about how terrible it is in the default setup, because I bet 90 percent of the users are happy with that and don't want it different (because if they were unhappy, they would start a new "wonderful" GUI... like KDE was started because CDE was crap, ugly and expensive...and GNOME was started because KDE was using QT, C++ and was Windows-like).
just had to get that off my chest...
Missing the point. We are not talking about how secure PINs are, we are talking about if a hand signature is more secure than a digital encrypted key on a card with PIN.
So, you say a hand signature that you probably show several times a day and that a lot of people know or can very easily get, is more secure than a card that has to be stolen plus a PIN that has to be sneaked out before? I don't think so.
The difference is that if someone swipes your digital card they can make perfect signatures.
What about the PIN? It's not as easy as that.
It's only a matter of time before somebody signs something (or appears to), and then denies any involvment. Excuses (true or not) of "My card was stolen", "They made me tell them the key", "I don't know what you're talking about" will presumably be uttered (in german).
Hmmm... very strange argument. Why is that different to hand signatures then?
Same excuses the other way round (and as courts probably here them very often):
"My signature was faked." (Event though it looks the same)
"They made me sign it."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
uttered in any language.
It doesn't matter if it was done digital or analog. The legal situation isn't worse. It only got better, because you have more security features. It's quite easy to fake a hand signature, but it's nearly impossible to fake a digital signature...
What's scary is that someone thinks it's scary to be archiving public forums. This isn't Big Brother. Just imagine losing all the history contained in Linus' various Usenet posts.
You're missing the point here. Linus' various Usenet posts are nothing compared to posts in touchier newsgroups.
Searching for my father's name brought up this other relative, who wrote about his girlfriend having been abused as a teenager and what to do.
Not exactly the stuff I expect to find or what I want to know, when I see him. Maybe archiving newsgroups which aren't about sensitive topics would prove your point more, but don't forget that there are more newsgroups than comp.os.linux.*
It makes me nervous to find texts about people
having been abused and writing about it. And
that's by searching for their names and what
they've done technically the last years.
The Usenet was IMHO never as public as the web,
but had much more a private character, where people
could say what they only wanted to know certain
groups.
Just imagine, your name is well known (e.g. Linus Torvalds)
and suddenly someone who searches for it finds
texts you wanted to keep more or less private.
This is quite different to quite a lot of other methods. It allows to backup encrypted files to e.g. CDROM and still have them mountable from there. Works quite well.
I have a small distinction to point out: The terrorist money being frozen would have been spent on killing civilians. Those terrorists are active today. Nazi memorabilia are, for the most part, historical artifacts (like a civil war flag or a gun fired by Napoleon). It's not like the money from Nazi memorabilia would go towards funding a new Nazi party.
So, tell me, are there no neonazi terrorists out there today? Who are getting more people (and money!) by spreading hate literature and memorabilia? And they are actively fighting as well or at least preparing until they can hit e.g. the US government. I guess, that counts as active terrorism and is not something historical that doesn't affect today's life. Don't underestimate the power of extremists literature/symbols/rituals.
I hope people remember that there are not only muslim terrorists out there...
> The question asked for information about partitition schema, not file systems.
The headline was about partition types not partition schemes. And the question was about filesystems (which makes more sense than a question about partition types anyways).
(Does nobody even read the submissions anymore??)
Due to the very precise time division multiplexing used with GSM, the distance you are from the base station you are currently subscribed can be gleaned down to a metre.
I really, really, really doubt this. The whole of Europe is trying to find out how to position yourself with mobile phones to get down to one metre precision. The solution of just using GSM with the cells information and distance information gets you in about 400 metres accuracy (depending of the density of cells etc.). Combine it with GPS, you can try to get it to 10 metres in ideal situations. Of course GPS doesn't help you much in cities like New York with their high buildings blocking the satellites signal and having multi path effects.
So, if this is really true, tell your telco to come to Europe and earn shit loads (actually Vodaphone is British)... Don't believe everything that companies say.
Do a search on Yahoo.
First picture on the result page says:
"Yahoo! Powered by Google"
or for "www.yahoo.fr": "Yahoo! Résultants avec Google"
Duh.
hmm... let's look at this:
;)
living in:
USA 1054 + Canada 185 + Mexico 14 = North America 1253
but the continents part says: North America 1106
I think, there's something not quite right here......
hmmm... this made me think. Running on Debian an security update is as easy as pie (as mentioned before a lot: apt-get update; apt-get upgrade).
;)
But how about if something breaks? How do I "rollback" the patches to fix a broken system?
All I can think of is getting the older packages and installing them by hand. Granted, this has never ever happened to me, except in unstable dist, but it would be interesting to know if apt-get/debian/dpkg supports this easily.
I think this would be a cool feature for emergencies, because you never know...
Found it mirrored here... after Ximians download site is not reacting for me anymore.
/ pu b/red-carpet/binary/
/ pu b/red-carpet/source/
u b/red-carpet/binary/debian-22-i386/ ./
Binaries:
http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.helixcode.com
Sources:
http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.helixcode.com
Debian apt sources.list:
deb http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.helixcode.com/p
Have fun.
I want this picture as my desktop background (linux of course). Maybe someone can make a better scan available? I read it in the c't today as well and found it quite amusing.