This is not the responsibility of napster. The IP address of the person who illegally offers copyrighted material is known. The path that should be followed from there is to go to the ISP for closure on the identity behind that IP address. With a court order, ISPs should and will disclose this information to the authorities. It has been like this for every situation where illegal activities took place, be it warez, cracking or MP3.
The biggest problem in this case are hungry ISPs who will hapilly accept people on their servers within five minutes after filling in a false ID. But that is really their problem at that point. Napster is nothing more than an IRC network with bells and whistles: It's a transit system. To make it even more interesting, the actual transfers of the illegal material is direct IP-to-IP, not going through napster's systems, like DCC on irc. This makes their service akin to offering links to possibly illegal material. Are you going to sue roadbuilders if you get hit by a drunk driver?
That's a bad indication. Not adequately handling error-returns from library calls is a really bad habit, which gives me a bad feeling about the overall robustness of the app.
While I'm certainly no fan of the way Stardivision/Sun try to let Star Office turn into a Windows95 with startbuttons and braindead MDI interfaces at all, the speed of the app has actually impressed me. At the home office, I run Star Office over X, running it on a simple sluggish K6/266 displaying it on an even slower Sun Sparcstation 5 through a 10Mbit X11 session. And it's fast.
Perhaps now's a good time to switch from Englightenment to a Windowmanager?;)
Both Gtk and Motif are highly customizable. You'd be surprised how much better Motif apps can look if you mess around a bit with the resources, stopping it from thinking the menu font should be 18pts and buttons should be the size of Mount Everest. The same is true for Gtk, check out documentation on gtkrc.
The thing I dislike about Gtk is the API itself, which is the reason I use FLTK, which also helps keeping the tabs on memory overhead a bit better than the two mainstream linux toolkits at this time.
Yes, people think "x86" when they say "Linux". While this can be advocated as a Bad Thing, I think it's not much worse than those who think "Linux" when they say "Unix". This is a similair platform lock-in which is becoming much more widespread.
There still are lots of Open Source applications which are a major pain to port to anything but Linux, leaving my Indy, Indigo and Sparcstation dead in the lurch. Yes I could run linux on the Sparc, but have a bad experience with its performance. Linux for MIPS/SGI is just not mature enough to use on a WorkStation (definitely not one that has higher-end OpenGL graphic boards).
Writing code that is portable across multiple UN*X platforms takes a little thinking, but isn't too hard (POSIX, UNIX98). People should be aware of those standards and shun away from linux-specific APIs and kernel calls, when there is no reason for using them.
On the Interface Usability plane, GIMP is actually really getting there. Especially with the 1.1 releases, there is little functionality not in Gimp that is in the packages you mentioned.
This is not saying that there aren't still fields where Gimp has a long way to go. Also, mimicking what's already out there is not always the best idea. I was always pissed off by the fact that there was no simple way to create lines and outline boxes in Photoshop (select box, fill with color, shrink border one pixel, delete selection, yuck). I'm sort of disappointed Gimp lacks this too.
You know what's really missing? And not only on Linux, but also on Mac, Windows, BeOS, OS/2 and all those other platforms (excluding Amiga)? Something to replace DeluxePaint, which was and still is one of the most useful programs for on-screen pixel art (which currently is the focus of Gimp to begin with) available. Someone dig Dan Silva out of his coffin!
GIMP really isn't fast. I really like using it, but as soon as I get outside of the 640x480 website-graphics scope, it becomes too slow to be managable. I've tried several times to use gimp to create simple CDROM covers at 300 dpi, and kept being surprised by it ending up more sluggish than what I remember from Photoshop on the computers of three years ago.
I've upgraded to the latest developer releases to see if in this field there is any improvement. There is a little, but there's, in my opinion, still miles to go before it will be feasible for high-resolution print graphics. I think they should consider focusing on using a method where you can do gimp operations on a low-resolution preview-image to later repeat those operations scriptomatically on the full res copy.
I seriously don't get you folks. You determine what kind of operating software to install on a $3000 piece of equipment solely on the availability of games? Get an N64 or something, more cost effective and more stable.
I would like to see a cell phone that will be able to transmit my location after I use it to smash the face of the manager of the afforementioned burger giant. If I find one, I'll use it to smash the entire burger joint afterwards.
Most Dutch cellular providers have a deal with gin.nl for just about the same service, only that one is opt-in. Unsollicited opt-out services are the worst. Yuck.
Somewhere in Scandinavia, this has actually been offered as a service. I'm not sure whether this included cellphones, but it was a free calling service, which interrupted your phonecalls for commercial messages at a set interval. And there seem to be people that actually want to do this.
Same is the case with commercial television. I hate commercials, so my viewing habits are limited to PayTV and DVD. I don't mind to pay for content if that means I'll be kept away from being TV-spammed.
On other news, I've heard of an ISP which was planning to offer flat-fee calls in the Netherlands if you agreed to use their proprietary client software which continuously spammed you with the banners of their choice. Again, people will probably read the word "FREE" and go for it.
Perhaps we're the problem? Perhaps we lack the gene for "enjoying to be bombarded with retarded, repetitive messages that try to convince us to buy crappy stuff"?
We are listed in the WHOIS contacts as technical contact. Since we run over 30,000 domains, you can imagine the amount of 'fun' we have here. I compulsively send abuse-complaints, but here lies the biggest problem: Clueless Monolithic ISPs treat their abuse queues with even less "service" than they provide their customers.
Organizations like ARIN and NetSol should make it mandatory for their customers to have a responsive abuse-handling system in place. Since general cluelessness inside the IP cloud will only rise over time, we can no longer rely on mere co-operative spirit to keep this net running. As long as companies are not penalized for the fact that they DO spend ten thousands of dollars on mailservers but then DON'T spend a fraction of those costs to get them properly configured to not act as convenient spam reflectors (above.net, anyone?) this bullshit will rise and rise and rise.
While we're at it, ARIN, RIPE and APNIC should also make it mandatory for netblock owners to make sure they cannot be used as smurf reflectors. Same kind of problem.
Of course, inadequate MCSE certification programs and NT systems with defaults from hell aren't exactly helping us either. Most UNIX vendors have learned by now that 60% of sysadmins never download patches, read documentation or configure their systems properly after initial setup. Hence, most current UNIX systems no longer set themselves up as open-relay proxy-bouncing root-for-all systems out of the box. NT, however, seems to not have gotten to that point yet. I surely hope this will change.
A personal sidenote to this, I think the NS6 'skin' is actually butt ugly. And like with E and with gtk-themes, it is very noticable that this skin stuff is responsible for a lot of slowness and cruftiness that wouldn't be there if they would focus on making things look clean instead of 'cool'.
I think the biggest problem with UNIX was and is that, spoken frankly, a major part of hackerdom has a seriously deranged sense of taste. A careful glance at the typical kind of desktop to be found on themes.org (with the exception of those mimicking other OSes) seems to confirm this.
Not necessarily. I know lots of hackers that prefer their desktops to be swift and practical, not tinkery. I think it's a good sign if you're too busy hacking to bother with your window decoration. Most truly amazing hackers I know run whatever came up in their/usr/X11R6/bin first when they digged for window managers. Most will run away fast from E and friends, cherishing their precious CPU cycles for egcs instead.
You must not forget, though, that what a Mac user sees as inferior is not only the Windows software platform, but also the clunky hardware that is in a PC. I have plenty of machines, ranging from Apple through Sun to SGI, the machines I am least affected to are my Intel boxes, even though generally they are faster at a lot of things I do. I think the non-(w|l)intel boxen radiate a spiritual sense of holeness that PCs, due to their cost-effectiveness fetish, will never reach.
Now the big question is going to be, are Corel only going to release Linux/x86 binaries, or are they going to actually really use the power of the "fragmented" UN*X market and port over with ease to related systems like Solaris and IRIX and to other hardware platforms like Alpha and PowerPC?
A friend of mine stole a 10mg dose once. He didn't exactly like what it did for him (felt all bloated up) and wouldn't want to repeat it. Although this one anecdote is hardly research, I think the concensus is that the effects ritalin has on people who actually need it is so distinctively different from the effects it has on others, that mis-prescribing it should be out of the question. Unless if parents insist on giving their children medication that makes them feel shitty.
I think you have a misconception about ritalin here. It is not an anti-depressant. It is used to treat children and adults that are diagnosed with AD(H)D. This is not an illness, at least not in the sense that it can be cured. You can send someone with the disorder through oodles of therapy sessions and never see any results.
The fact that ritalin is chemically akin to speed and cocaine scares a lot of people. They have wild visions of children with rabid eyes ready to stab them. The entire point is, though, that the effects of the drug when taken by a person with the disorder is entirely counterintuitive. It lessens te hype and gives the person a chance to think straight for a change. It does not flatten emotions. It does not blur perception. It does not provoke agressiveness.
Two things in this world saved my life. The first is ritalin, the second is the Palm Pilot. Together, they keep my life from deteriorating into absolute chaos. I think a lot of things in my life would have gone much smoother if I was properly diagnosed and treated as a kid. Parents who are reluctant to give their child ritalin, while it is positively diagnosed as AD(H)D, are depriving their children of the chance of a normal life for the sake of War on Drugs propaganda.
On the case of Mental illness in geek-rich environments, let me assure you this is very common. At my workplace, there are people with ADHD, with bipolar disorders and with slight autistic tendencies. People with this kind of disorder combined with a high intelligence tend to flourish well in the world of Internet and Information Technology. It takes a skillful people person to manage these people, but if this is properly done you have an army of skilled, intelligent and highly creative workers at your disposal.
Stray cats? Seen it happen before. I pity the admin who doesn't know where their opers live. I wouldn't give someone an O-line if I didn't know where to send the cab when I'd feel like bringing my baseball bat over for closer inspection;).
So it's okay that this happens? It's okay for people to suffer tremendous monetary damages just so that the rest of the world doesn't think the internet is safe? Bandwidth is not free, don't believe the hype. Lots of bandwidth serving no reason but to keep an irc server down is certainly not free.
There are definitely organizations, or gangs of irc "warriors". With vast amounts of hacked.edu machines at their disposal. And waaaaay too much time on their hands.
Please try to convince me that you are making constructive use of your time by posting on slashdot. It's more of the same, really. IRC is a perfect medium for people to meet and have actual conversations (the possibility exist and it actually takes place). It also serves as a platform for lonely and depressed people to keep some form of community spirit. And it's a good platform for people with a hearing impairment to have actual conversations without being 'different'.
The shutdown action, although I question its helpfulness, is mostly intended as a protest against the few who indeed should get a life outside of irc. I have one, thank you, but I would have more of it if I didn't get called out of bed frequently because some spoiled brat didn't get any pudding.
A lot of people seem to have no clue what the average irc session of someone who is opered up looks like. The minute I get online and oper up, I get *flooded* with requests for assistance, half of which have to do with channels that have been taken over. At such a point, there is little place for "seeing the humor of it", although generally I try so (recognizing the fun one can have in 'fucking around'). When you've removed the same characters from other people's channels umpteen times, there comes a moment when you don't want to bother with listening ro their next excuse-of-the-day anymore.
When confronted with the amount of shit that happens on irc networks, most operators tend to hang on to the cynical side of life. Does that make it okay to flood servers? Do you have any idea what kind of damage is caused by this? Ever been called out of bed at 5am over a frigging irc server? The fun departs quickly, trust me.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not the responsibility of napster. The IP address of the person who illegally offers copyrighted material is known. The path that should be followed from there is to go to the ISP for closure on the identity behind that IP address. With a court order, ISPs should and will disclose this information to the authorities. It has been like this for every situation where illegal activities took place, be it warez, cracking or MP3.
The biggest problem in this case are hungry ISPs who will hapilly accept people on their servers within five minutes after filling in a false ID. But that is really their problem at that point. Napster is nothing more than an IRC network with bells and whistles: It's a transit system. To make it even more interesting, the actual transfers of the illegal material is direct IP-to-IP, not going through napster's systems, like DCC on irc. This makes their service akin to offering links to possibly illegal material. Are you going to sue roadbuilders if you get hit by a drunk driver?
Pi
That's a bad indication. Not adequately handling error-returns from library calls is a really bad habit, which gives me a bad feeling about the overall robustness of the app.
Pi
While I'm certainly no fan of the way Stardivision/Sun try to let Star Office turn into a Windows95 with startbuttons and braindead MDI interfaces at all, the speed of the app has actually impressed me. At the home office, I run Star Office over X, running it on a simple sluggish K6/266 displaying it on an even slower Sun Sparcstation 5 through a 10Mbit X11 session. And it's fast.
Perhaps now's a good time to switch from Englightenment to a Windowmanager?;)
Pi
As mentioned in oodles of posts above this one, WPO2000 uses WINE, not winelib.
HTH. HAND.Pi
Both Gtk and Motif are highly customizable. You'd be surprised how much better Motif apps can look if you mess around a bit with the resources, stopping it from thinking the menu font should be 18pts and buttons should be the size of Mount Everest. The same is true for Gtk, check out documentation on gtkrc.
The thing I dislike about Gtk is the API itself, which is the reason I use FLTK, which also helps keeping the tabs on memory overhead a bit better than the two mainstream linux toolkits at this time.
Pi
Yes, people think "x86" when they say "Linux". While this can be advocated as a Bad Thing, I think it's not much worse than those who think "Linux" when they say "Unix". This is a similair platform lock-in which is becoming much more widespread.
There still are lots of Open Source applications which are a major pain to port to anything but Linux, leaving my Indy, Indigo and Sparcstation dead in the lurch. Yes I could run linux on the Sparc, but have a bad experience with its performance. Linux for MIPS/SGI is just not mature enough to use on a WorkStation (definitely not one that has higher-end OpenGL graphic boards).
Writing code that is portable across multiple UN*X platforms takes a little thinking, but isn't too hard (POSIX, UNIX98). People should be aware of those standards and shun away from linux-specific APIs and kernel calls, when there is no reason for using them.
Pi
On the Interface Usability plane, GIMP is actually really getting there. Especially with the 1.1 releases, there is little functionality not in Gimp that is in the packages you mentioned.
This is not saying that there aren't still fields where Gimp has a long way to go. Also, mimicking what's already out there is not always the best idea. I was always pissed off by the fact that there was no simple way to create lines and outline boxes in Photoshop (select box, fill with color, shrink border one pixel, delete selection, yuck). I'm sort of disappointed Gimp lacks this too.
You know what's really missing? And not only on Linux, but also on Mac, Windows, BeOS, OS/2 and all those other platforms (excluding Amiga)? Something to replace DeluxePaint, which was and still is one of the most useful programs for on-screen pixel art (which currently is the focus of Gimp to begin with) available. Someone dig Dan Silva out of his coffin!
Pi
GIMP really isn't fast. I really like using it, but as soon as I get outside of the 640x480 website-graphics scope, it becomes too slow to be managable. I've tried several times to use gimp to create simple CDROM covers at 300 dpi, and kept being surprised by it ending up more sluggish than what I remember from Photoshop on the computers of three years ago.
I've upgraded to the latest developer releases to see if in this field there is any improvement. There is a little, but there's, in my opinion, still miles to go before it will be feasible for high-resolution print graphics. I think they should consider focusing on using a method where you can do gimp operations on a low-resolution preview-image to later repeat those operations scriptomatically on the full res copy.
Pi
I seriously don't get you folks. You determine what kind of operating software to install on a $3000 piece of equipment solely on the availability of games? Get an N64 or something, more cost effective and more stable.
PiWhat secrets? Bill Gates' secret recipe for Java Guacamole?
Pi
I would like to see a cell phone that will be able to transmit my location after I use it to smash the face of the manager of the afforementioned burger giant. If I find one, I'll use it to smash the entire burger joint afterwards.
PiMost Dutch cellular providers have a deal with gin.nl for just about the same service, only that one is opt-in. Unsollicited opt-out services are the worst. Yuck.
Pi
Somewhere in Scandinavia, this has actually been offered as a service. I'm not sure whether this included cellphones, but it was a free calling service, which interrupted your phonecalls for commercial messages at a set interval. And there seem to be people that actually want to do this.
Same is the case with commercial television. I hate commercials, so my viewing habits are limited to PayTV and DVD. I don't mind to pay for content if that means I'll be kept away from being TV-spammed.
On other news, I've heard of an ISP which was planning to offer flat-fee calls in the Netherlands if you agreed to use their proprietary client software which continuously spammed you with the banners of their choice. Again, people will probably read the word "FREE" and go for it.
Perhaps we're the problem? Perhaps we lack the gene for "enjoying to be bombarded with retarded, repetitive messages that try to convince us to buy crappy stuff"?
Pi
We are listed in the WHOIS contacts as technical contact. Since we run over 30,000 domains, you can imagine the amount of 'fun' we have here. I compulsively send abuse-complaints, but here lies the biggest problem: Clueless Monolithic ISPs treat their abuse queues with even less "service" than they provide their customers.
Organizations like ARIN and NetSol should make it mandatory for their customers to have a responsive abuse-handling system in place. Since general cluelessness inside the IP cloud will only rise over time, we can no longer rely on mere co-operative spirit to keep this net running. As long as companies are not penalized for the fact that they DO spend ten thousands of dollars on mailservers but then DON'T spend a fraction of those costs to get them properly configured to not act as convenient spam reflectors (above.net, anyone?) this bullshit will rise and rise and rise.
While we're at it, ARIN, RIPE and APNIC should also make it mandatory for netblock owners to make sure they cannot be used as smurf reflectors. Same kind of problem.
Of course, inadequate MCSE certification programs and NT systems with defaults from hell aren't exactly helping us either. Most UNIX vendors have learned by now that 60% of sysadmins never download patches, read documentation or configure their systems properly after initial setup. Hence, most current UNIX systems no longer set themselves up as open-relay proxy-bouncing root-for-all systems out of the box. NT, however, seems to not have gotten to that point yet. I surely hope this will change.
Pi
A personal sidenote to this, I think the NS6 'skin' is actually butt ugly. And like with E and with gtk-themes, it is very noticable that this skin stuff is responsible for a lot of slowness and cruftiness that wouldn't be there if they would focus on making things look clean instead of 'cool'.
I think the biggest problem with UNIX was and is that, spoken frankly, a major part of hackerdom has a seriously deranged sense of taste. A careful glance at the typical kind of desktop to be found on themes.org (with the exception of those mimicking other OSes) seems to confirm this.
Pi
Not necessarily. I know lots of hackers that prefer their desktops to be swift and practical, not tinkery. I think it's a good sign if you're too busy hacking to bother with your window decoration. Most truly amazing hackers I know run whatever came up in their /usr/X11R6/bin first when they digged for window managers. Most will run away fast from E and friends, cherishing their precious CPU cycles for egcs instead.
Pi
You must not forget, though, that what a Mac user sees as inferior is not only the Windows software platform, but also the clunky hardware that is in a PC. I have plenty of machines, ranging from Apple through Sun to SGI, the machines I am least affected to are my Intel boxes, even though generally they are faster at a lot of things I do. I think the non-(w|l)intel boxen radiate a spiritual sense of holeness that PCs, due to their cost-effectiveness fetish, will never reach.
Now the big question is going to be, are Corel only going to release Linux/x86 binaries, or are they going to actually really use the power of the "fragmented" UN*X market and port over with ease to related systems like Solaris and IRIX and to other hardware platforms like Alpha and PowerPC?
Pi
A friend of mine stole a 10mg dose once. He didn't exactly like what it did for him (felt all bloated up) and wouldn't want to repeat it. Although this one anecdote is hardly research, I think the concensus is that the effects ritalin has on people who actually need it is so distinctively different from the effects it has on others, that mis-prescribing it should be out of the question. Unless if parents insist on giving their children medication that makes them feel shitty.
HAND,Pi
I think you have a misconception about ritalin here. It is not an anti-depressant. It is used to treat children and adults that are diagnosed with AD(H)D. This is not an illness, at least not in the sense that it can be cured. You can send someone with the disorder through oodles of therapy sessions and never see any results.
The fact that ritalin is chemically akin to speed and cocaine scares a lot of people. They have wild visions of children with rabid eyes ready to stab them. The entire point is, though, that the effects of the drug when taken by a person with the disorder is entirely counterintuitive. It lessens te hype and gives the person a chance to think straight for a change. It does not flatten emotions. It does not blur perception. It does not provoke agressiveness.
Two things in this world saved my life. The first is ritalin, the second is the Palm Pilot. Together, they keep my life from deteriorating into absolute chaos. I think a lot of things in my life would have gone much smoother if I was properly diagnosed and treated as a kid. Parents who are reluctant to give their child ritalin, while it is positively diagnosed as AD(H)D, are depriving their children of the chance of a normal life for the sake of War on Drugs propaganda.
On the case of Mental illness in geek-rich environments, let me assure you this is very common. At my workplace, there are people with ADHD, with bipolar disorders and with slight autistic tendencies. People with this kind of disorder combined with a high intelligence tend to flourish well in the world of Internet and Information Technology. It takes a skillful people person to manage these people, but if this is properly done you have an army of skilled, intelligent and highly creative workers at your disposal.
Pi
No, generally these are very territorial animals. The main network is the one where they are known, loathed and worshipped by their peers.
Pi
Stray cats? Seen it happen before. I pity the admin who doesn't know where their opers live. I wouldn't give someone an O-line if I didn't know where to send the cab when I'd feel like bringing my baseball bat over for closer inspection;).
Pi
So it's okay that this happens? It's okay for people to suffer tremendous monetary damages just so that the rest of the world doesn't think the internet is safe? Bandwidth is not free, don't believe the hype. Lots of bandwidth serving no reason but to keep an irc server down is certainly not free.
Pi
There are definitely organizations, or gangs of irc "warriors". With vast amounts of hacked .edu machines at their disposal. And waaaaay too much time on their hands.
Pi
Please try to convince me that you are making constructive use of your time by posting on slashdot. It's more of the same, really. IRC is a perfect medium for people to meet and have actual conversations (the possibility exist and it actually takes place). It also serves as a platform for lonely and depressed people to keep some form of community spirit. And it's a good platform for people with a hearing impairment to have actual conversations without being 'different'.
The shutdown action, although I question its helpfulness, is mostly intended as a protest against the few who indeed should get a life outside of irc. I have one, thank you, but I would have more of it if I didn't get called out of bed frequently because some spoiled brat didn't get any pudding.
Pi
When confronted with the amount of shit that happens on irc networks, most operators tend to hang on to the cynical side of life. Does that make it okay to flood servers? Do you have any idea what kind of damage is caused by this? Ever been called out of bed at 5am over a frigging irc server? The fun departs quickly, trust me.
Pi