The real source of road rage is not being able to say, "excuse me." It frustrates humans because we need to be able to express ourselves. We're pack animals and the cars isolate us.
I believe there's much truth to this, perhaps even more because honking is mostly seen as an act of agression.
If you've been to Mumbai or any other indian city, you will know that all trucks have a "bumper sticker" saying "Horn OK Please" which basically means that they'd prefer you to honk before you pass, so that they can give you the necessary space on the road. Everybody honks at everybody, and noone feels offended.
When you first arrive there you'll think they're in one massive road rage all of them, but after a few trips around town in rush hour, you realize that their traffic wouln't work without it. You simply can't squeeze 5 lanes of cars onto a 3 lane road otherwise, and honking is in no way rude, it's simply the only way to communicate, and it just works, despite the extreme density of traffic there.
It's true what I see others have replied, watermarks can be abused, and it only takes one virus to make it almost useless for legal matters.
But if used with respect, it could indeed be a useful tool to make people stop sharing files and albums with thousands of others on purpose, if for instance the industry consequently send a friendly mail to any "leakers" telling them that their purchase has ended up on the black market and recommending the customer to check their computers for malware. But of course it could not stop people from doing the crime if they really intend to and know what they're doing, but over some time they can gather statistics and point out tendencies to act upon, either by closing the account or using it as circumstantial evidence in cases where it begins to look like abuse of the precious "freedom under responsability" which non-DRM material is. If the media industry trusts you enough to sell you stuff you can reproduce easily, why wouldn't you trust them? If in the end it turns out to be a virus that your anti-virus solution has not been able to detect, perhaps the responsible party is the company selling you that solution, until they catch the criminal who wrote the virus.
But okay in countries where EULA's are valid, the AV companies can simply deny responsibility from the start, which doesn't seem serious to me, which leads to another conspiracy, that the AV companies writes many of the vira themselfes, so it bites itself in the tail, but most people still trust the security industry even when they're not willing to give any guarantees at all.
From my perspective, I may as well trust the media as the security industry, they're both places where there's big money to be made...
As I see it, this AGPL thing is flawed in one way; it doesn't work!
As another on this thread have mentioned, you can include AGPL'ed files with no consequences. And then there's the flaw that copyright is about distribution not about use, so the AGPL is only effective where the infamous EULA's are effective as well...
As an european I want to thank the FSF for giving our online services such a huge advantage over the american ones.
It works alright, and imitates Visio rather well, however I don't like either of them. They're too heavy and too arbitrary when it comes to measurements.
Dia hits a spot for me, it's light and could to some extend do light CAD like drawings. But Dia isn't there either, it's not always good at exporting files other than raster that can be used to put inside documents. And of course it cannot do what Visio for Architects can do, reverse engineer software and make nice class diagrams and everything, you would need yet another program for that.
So to put in some UML generated from code would need you to use one program to make a dia file, and then use dia to arrange it and then export it into raster, which rarely looks good. The windows version of Dia can export to.emf pretty nicely, but I'm a linux user, so what can I do...
So there's good attempts but none that does quite what Visio does, such an application in OOo would be nice.
I think I get a different file from many others when I download OOo...
- some complain about the styles not being consistent, I can't recognize that. In my opinion OOo is much easier to style documentwide, with possibility to create custom text fields, paragraphs, pages and what not. And at the same time OOo handles huge documents just perfectly, applying the styles of the master document to all its subdocuments, so if writing a book and you want to change some layout globally, just edit the styles of the masterdocument. It has been a great help for me when working in larger documentation projects, where one person cannot do it alone, and in the same situation the export to PDF is invaluable.
- and what's that with the programs not working together? It's not very well explained, but if what people mean is just the ability to show a database or spreadsheet or drawing in a document, in an editable manner, they should look at the "Insert" and find OLE Objects, it works like a charm for me.
- I've seen many other complaints that I don't recognize that I don't remember right now.
Anyway back to the actual topic, I believe we'll see Thunderbird changing shape a bit, you gotta remember who expressed their support of OOo not long ago. I know some people can't stand it for its interface, but if you compare Outlook with IBM's Lotus Notes, Outlook has a long way to go before it's production ready. IBM wouldn't mind making an open competitor to their own client, as long as they can sell the Domino servers to run the groupware/database features.
It's true that with OOo and Thunderbird's plugin architecture, you would soon see it supporting other groupware solutions, but there's a long way to go before they get better than IBM in that game.
But of course, it'll take a little while before Thunderbird can reach Outlook, as it is now, it is as said, only a competitor to Outlook Express. It would have made more sense if it could have been Ximian/Novell Evolution getting integrated with OOo, but I'm afraid MS wouldn't let Novell participate... MS have done much to avoid competition on Office already, just read the EULA of Visual Studio.
You seem to forget that Trusted Computing, once enabled and put into effect is a white list rather than just some "bonus" software you get to be allowed to run. You should know that as a used-to-be FOSS fanboy.
On the performance things and so on, I have no comments, as I have only little XP, and no Vista, experience what so ever. But I do agree, DRM used correctly wouldn't be that bad, except that I wouldn't be able to use a legitimate version of it, but content providers have already proven that they're not mature enough for such a tool.
Absolutely correct, it's very much what "trusted computing" was/is all about.
And I don't like the idea that some single organization or individual, other than myself, should be able to control the white list of what can be run on my computer.
But if, on the other hand, I can privately white list something for execution and it was possible for anyone to become an online white list provider, like anyone can set up a homepage, my opinion on the matter would change drastically. Because then I can choose who to trust.
But of course such liberty to make your own decisions is a security breach only helping malware and terrorists. In other words, such a system could never be 100% trusted.
I think it depends on the purpose of the system. If I have an application that requires perhaps Perl and an Oracle server, then I don't need to mention the layers below when asking for those requirements to be met.
In the same way, when releasing a user space application, it may require the Linux kernel, or it may require a UNIX/POSIX environment, which does not specifically require GNU to be used. Most people would want Linux because of it's hardware support, why should they care about GNU to provide the user space tools in between their hardware and their desktop?
Only few lives under pure capitalism, just like only few live under pure communism.
And the lawyer thing is primarily an American phenomenon.
Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po
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Via Unveils 1-Watt x86 CPU
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not sure if parent was a joke, but i found it funny.
In some EU countries economic cars have less yearly tax already, I think it's calculated from the CO2 emission pr. km. And cars that can't perform 15km/l or more, have had their price tax raised, while longer running ones have had it reduced.
If there's an offset it would only take 3 originals to know which parts of them are tampered with, and what data should be used to produce the original file. If there's no offset it's actually more difficult to cloak the watermark completely, as the watermarks may have similarities which cannot be filtered out. If you expect this combining to occur, you could calculate a matrix system in them, so that by identifying those similarities in the resulting file, they could point out which two were combined. By adding dimensions to the matrix they can then increase the number of originals required to cloak the watermark enough to hide your tracks. The size of the watermarks increases exponentially, so it wouldn't be long before they need longer music tracks to keep them in.
However, I do like this better than DRM, as long as it doesn't affect the sound, of course it can be abused in a way so you're not even allowed to accidentally drop your optic media, as it may place a scratch in the watermark. But if they do it good the first time, it can also be quite scratch resistant.
This is an unfair game. I mean how much have a Windows user actually used Linux? While Linux users could most often go take a seat as a Windows sysop from day to day, with no training needed, because Windows is practically impossible to avoid when being an IT professional, unless you run your own business or other exceptions like that.
There's some truth in Linux not being easy to apply future drivers to, and you got to know the version and you won't find drivers for a legacy kernel. The solution is to update the kernel, and all the drivers will be built in, of course most modern distros makes that awfully easy, so the gradual upgrading of Linux saves it on that point. Linux is hostile to vendors, or maybe i should call it "not very encouraging", so community shouldn't whine when vendor support is lacking, instead applaud when a few vendors actually dare to step up to the task.
On the other hand, there's also hardware that won't work under Windows 2000, not only have MS cut support of this great OS, but I believe they also do their best to fight that any "new" technologies finds their way back to good old 2000, they've done it before, and it often has to do with USB and standard drivers. I'm thinking of how there's no UVC driver for Win2k and how the USB Mass Storage driver is not available to all versions with USB support, even though those versions of Windows were supported at the time it came around.
But the argument that cannot be disputed is that, if you happen to run short of a functionality you need, you have all the options you don't want as an end user: develop it yourself, rant about your desire and hope for mercy from developers or do the simplest and most common thing, wait until someone gets that bright idea and make the feature you long for. Users today have been lulled into sleep and wouldn't think about suggesting their ideas to the developers, nor would they think of or be able to afford to hire a developer, to do the development for them. Which both would be valid contributions to community, but for people to contribute in ways like that, it has to be as easy as click-type-send almost like the automatic bug reports, perhaps even with the possibility of putting more weigh behind the wish by donating 2, 5 or 10 euro. Of course it would seem a little silly to have such a system built into the system in the beginning, with such a limited user base with such a high percentage of developers, but I believe it'd attract its actual audience.
Regarding the article, I've tried to say it before, but was voted overrated, I do not approve pirated software, even amongst those who can't afford the expensive packet, as long as there are free alternatives of adequate quality. And if students are to be taught about some particular software, their academy must borrow it to them, or the software house may actually give it to them for free (to get some free future marketing), even if that fails, I'm a living example that you can take a MS Office exam preparing only with OpenOffice.
Regarding Mythbusters, you've got to give them that they often do revisit their results, once enough people have disputed it at their homepage, and they do not keep it a secret that they're not scientists, and that their approach is about making such subjects entertaining. It's true that many things could be done on paper, it's just not everything that can be explained in 20 seconds so that everybody would understand the formulas at work. On the other hand, many of the big science names in history just observed reality without knowing the math on beforehand, and many of them did create false assumptions along the way. To me Mythbusters are about challenging the viewer, somehow provoking by their always conclusive results and you've got to admit, you want to watch it go boom as well.
So one should carry their nmap scanner visible while online? Or how are those "guns in public" laws of the US? Besides in many countries you can be punished for offending people by the way you act or appear in public, just like many countries would put drunkards in detention should they get a little too drunk for public eyes. In other words, I'd be sad to give up both freedom and privacy, just to simplify the rules.
Some regulation on developing/publishing/possessing point-and-click exploiting or virus-creation tools would make much more sense than banning proof of concept and investigation tools, the latter requires one to know what one is doing, thus one cannot deny intent. The problem is just where's the line between tool and toy? Who would define the baseline user? I mean to me, using tools, like nmap and hping, feels as natural as word processing does to others.
Sounds so, it's a pity, but predictable, that DRM is, in this case as well as many others, producing worse original products than the pirated. Imagine if Chinese copies of brands were of better quality than the ones from the source... I'd want a Lolls Loyce then, despite the bad spelling. A scenario that deserves some concern.
Sure they are illegal, if not wrapped up properly, however, nVidia's common driver platform is designed to be wrapped up with gluecode, and so their gluecode is opensource for Linux, thus legal. Some may say it's a dirty trick, but i believe many corporations says the same about not being able to write drivers for a GPL'ed kernel without revealing their secrets. This fight between community and corporations is not benefitting anyone, is it? Of course no one should steal code, that'd be unfair, but I vote for equal freedom for all.
Linux is "just" the kernel and GNU is what makes it useful.
But, I gotta agree that it seems unnecessarily confusing using that as the name of the system, especially if you want to promote the use of this great software combination. Because by consequently using the GNU/Linux term, you make people feel stupid and start telling the history of the OS already before they get started, it would be like if you had to say DOS/Windows or NEXT/MacOS each and every time you mention it.
I don't think it looks or sounds retarded, my only issue with it is relevance, because the people, to which this information matters, knows perfectly well what GNU is and the philosophy behind it.
So I'm a supporter of FOSS which is not only free and open about software, but also open to outsiders and new users, not trying to isolate itself into its core user base of developers and idealists. I also welcome commercial/closed source software for the platform, also closed source drivers, it's the freedom of choice for the developers of this kind of software, what license they choose for their own work, of course they must comply with the licenses of what they use to create this software, that's the rules of the copyright game. Then let the users be free to choose whether to use this commercial/closed source software or use the open alternative, to me the freedom of the platform is for everyone, whether they're open or closed source developers or end users.
All I'm saying is that by just using the term Linux, it all seems much more accessible, let people get introduced to the community and its history at their own pace, it may benefit FOSS as a whole.
There's several brands of tobacco, there's radio stations which doesn't play anything but top 40 and there's several kinds of Operating Systems.
If absolutely need a commercial-grade product, there's Solaris, if they can tolerate just a bit less commercial product there's OpenSuSE, if they want it easier there's Ubuntu, unfortunately MacOS X is still tied to its hardware, but that's also a fairly priced product in itself.
For a normal internet and document editing workstation, there's plenty of options, even OpenOffice won't take much longer to get used to than a new version of MS Office, the only truly addicted people are the gamers, which could just get a console, as that's where games belong, the problem about the consoles is just that the prices on new games are outrageous as well.
My point is that perhaps 70% of all Windows consumers are actually just psychologically addicted, just like some have a habit of eating excessive amounts of fat foods, and some would choose the car for a one mile trip that they could easily go by bike. The monopoly in this case is in the minds of people, it's not like there's no alternatives, there's plenty.
Don't worry it won't happen, such a move from science to politics is very rare. But turning politics into science/knowledge/common sense is, as you mention, quite common... the fears of terrorism, smokers and global warming just to mention a few recent cases.
You're right in that what's currently used for digital cable and satellite TV feeds hasn't been cracked. But this has a history, at least in Europe, of being cracked, holes found in the algorithms and all sorts of fun, then 6 months after it gets public known they change encryption system, and the TV pirates can start over. The encryption systems have in that way gotten so tough to crack that the pirates have found other ways, the most common way to get around the encryption today, is to get a receiver of which you can replace the firmware, and in that way get the receivers to share the smartcards with each others over the internet, for the time being the TV providers knows it's happening, but they fail to figure out how to prevent it, so instead they spread rumours that their encryption providers in Israel are able to detect when cardsharing occurs, but I have yet to hear about them catching anyone in that way.
I would find it a step back if my mobile couldn't do video calls.
Besides the 384kbit/s is really a treat when hooking up my laptop through bluetooth in a matter of seconds. Of course a dedicated UMTS modem would pull 3Mbit/s outta the air, but then it can't do anything else, I wouldn't like to carry around all kinda devices just to be hooked up in an instant.
If one have no prior knowledge of any of the two, one would probably probably start off searching for GUI on the page, no result on the.NET reference, and one result in Java: java.awt.dnd
So, let's go look closer at java.awt.dnd before ruling it out, even tho I can see this is just something drag'n'drop, it may refer to something more useful, who knows? I continue into DragSource, perhaps it can tell me exactly what kind of objects are used for this? From there I find something about a serialized form, being perhaps 30 pages of not so relevant text, and java awt.GraphicsEnvironment, which seems like some sort of rules for a canvas. So I would at this point give up and return to the overview. (in fact I would really give up just seeing the description of java.awt.dnd but if i didn't go there in this experiment I'd be accused of not trying hard enough)
Okay so the next thing so search for on the overviews would be "Graphical User Interface"... alright, same results as with GUI... Then how about "User Interface"? Alright now something happens (and by knowing where I should be going I also know that I am now on the right way). The Java overview gives me java.awt, java.swing.plaf.basic, java.swing.plaf.metal and java.swing.plaf.multi , while the.NET gives me System.ComponentModel.Design, System.Drawing.Design, System.ServiceProcess, System.Web.UI and System.Windows.Forms
From the descriptions it's difficult to sort out any of the results from the Java reference, while in the.NET it's easy to rule out System.ServiceProcess and System.Web.UI
Looking a little closer on my findings I rule out whatever says "custom", because noone starts out with GUI by customizing widgets, and the java.swing.plaf.* seems not very useful for my purpose, looking at their content of Interfaces and Classes, however being on the right path it wouldn't take long from there to find the generic swing namespace.
So the first useful results from the two would be System.Windows.Forms on.NET and java.awk on Java. Keep in mind that a search with no possible matches takes shorter time than those with useless matches, that doesn't reveal that they're useless from the start. Seeing the java.awk as the first useful result, with Java, I would probably go for that one, even though it resembles writing windows applications in C++ using the default Windows API, with lots of work and slow progress. I'm not the impatient kind, but I'm rather sure my employer would like more action for his money.
So I'll keep my first statement, Java is tricky to learn if you're on your own, with nobody to point out where to look and what to use. It is my experience that the tutorials available for Java starts with "Hello World" in a terminal, then without explaining what happens in between, they jump to some template project where you are just to handle those objects the template has laid out for you. And those covering more advanced projects usually features only code examples of a few useful features, while the text refers to objects like you "of course" have done that before even starting to read. It appears to me as a gap in what's available, the documentation refers to inside understandings, that I can't get without attending courses. This is most likely because Java is what's most commonly used in education to explain OOP, I learned OOP through C++ (which can also be a b*tch to learn from reference) so I don't know all those inside jokes the documentation refers to, there's too much of-course-you-know's as a result of a very widespread use in education, and I don't have 3, 6 or 9 months to learn a language, as I did during my education. To me it just doesn't seem very accessible.
Well you've got a few points, I hate excessive unordered documentation, I'm no good at reading it from one end to another, so I need to be able to cut to the bone in a matter of minutes. MSDN is very good at that with C#/.NET even though i use mono (mono-doc is also great but of course MS's is more complete). CPAN is also good at cutting to the bone in minutes. I have looked at the Java documentation, so I guess it's basically my inability to navigate it that has made me think otherwise.
But I'm sorry that I cannot take your "not being a real developer" seriously. An IDE is, as another comment states, a tool of productivity, no company would like to pay for the time I would need to learn it using just a text editor with syntax highlighting, managing makefiles, deployment folders and so on manually. So basically I stick to IDE's whenever it's not prototyping in Perl or Python, or making obscurely optimized code in C, Pascal or ASM, where I need to know exactly what's going on.
But on the other hand, you're right, I am rather green, I've only got 14 years experience (out of my 25 years long life) in programming just about anything in a number of languages I've lost count of. I have to mention that I haven't been professional for much more that 6 years, the first 8 years I was just curious and had time to learn from scratch.
btw. Thanks to MemoryDragon, I'll have a look at Netbeans and maven2.
While I've generally been able to adopt just about any other language over a weekend, Java seems to be my everest. Perl has CPAN and languages like Delphi and C# have (perhaps excessive) frameworks/repositories following them, Java can do just about nothing on its own, if I want to develop a GUI application, I'd first need to do some heavy research just to get started, I've heard Swing is the word for GUI, but I have no clue how to get it into my Eclipse, which i think is perhaps the most complete opensource IDE available, but it also seems that there's a million other alternatives, and what's worse, they don't necessarily work alike, there's not really a common codec of how to make GUI, while with mono I can choose GTK# or wx.NET and get going right away because most of the same things are called the same, and the row of order and input/output is almost the same.
Just a central directory for Java classes, or whatever they're called (just to confuse programmers), like Perl's CPAN, with just basic documentation and a human readable descriptions, would make me reconsider picking up Java, but as it is now, it's a pile of code I have no chance to get a greater picture of.
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Download Opera to download Firefox? Just like IE comes with Windows so you can download Firefox :)
I believe there's much truth to this, perhaps even more because honking is mostly seen as an act of agression.
If you've been to Mumbai or any other indian city, you will know that all trucks have a "bumper sticker" saying "Horn OK Please" which basically means that they'd prefer you to honk before you pass, so that they can give you the necessary space on the road. Everybody honks at everybody, and noone feels offended.
When you first arrive there you'll think they're in one massive road rage all of them, but after a few trips around town in rush hour, you realize that their traffic wouln't work without it. You simply can't squeeze 5 lanes of cars onto a 3 lane road otherwise, and honking is in no way rude, it's simply the only way to communicate, and it just works, despite the extreme density of traffic there.
It's true what I see others have replied, watermarks can be abused, and it only takes one virus to make it almost useless for legal matters.
But if used with respect, it could indeed be a useful tool to make people stop sharing files and albums with thousands of others on purpose, if for instance the industry consequently send a friendly mail to any "leakers" telling them that their purchase has ended up on the black market and recommending the customer to check their computers for malware. But of course it could not stop people from doing the crime if they really intend to and know what they're doing, but over some time they can gather statistics and point out tendencies to act upon, either by closing the account or using it as circumstantial evidence in cases where it begins to look like abuse of the precious "freedom under responsability" which non-DRM material is. If the media industry trusts you enough to sell you stuff you can reproduce easily, why wouldn't you trust them? If in the end it turns out to be a virus that your anti-virus solution has not been able to detect, perhaps the responsible party is the company selling you that solution, until they catch the criminal who wrote the virus.
But okay in countries where EULA's are valid, the AV companies can simply deny responsibility from the start, which doesn't seem serious to me, which leads to another conspiracy, that the AV companies writes many of the vira themselfes, so it bites itself in the tail, but most people still trust the security industry even when they're not willing to give any guarantees at all.
From my perspective, I may as well trust the media as the security industry, they're both places where there's big money to be made...
As I see it, this AGPL thing is flawed in one way; it doesn't work!
As another on this thread have mentioned, you can include AGPL'ed files with no consequences.
And then there's the flaw that copyright is about distribution not about use, so the AGPL is only effective where the infamous EULA's are effective as well...
As an european I want to thank the FSF for giving our online services such a huge advantage over the american ones.
It works alright, and imitates Visio rather well, however I don't like either of them. They're too heavy and too arbitrary when it comes to measurements.
.emf pretty nicely, but I'm a linux user, so what can I do...
Dia hits a spot for me, it's light and could to some extend do light CAD like drawings. But Dia isn't there either, it's not always good at exporting files other than raster that can be used to put inside documents. And of course it cannot do what Visio for Architects can do, reverse engineer software and make nice class diagrams and everything, you would need yet another program for that.
So to put in some UML generated from code would need you to use one program to make a dia file, and then use dia to arrange it and then export it into raster, which rarely looks good. The windows version of Dia can export to
So there's good attempts but none that does quite what Visio does, such an application in OOo would be nice.
I think I get a different file from many others when I download OOo...
- some complain about the styles not being consistent, I can't recognize that. In my opinion OOo is much easier to style documentwide, with possibility to create custom text fields, paragraphs, pages and what not. And at the same time OOo handles huge documents just perfectly, applying the styles of the master document to all its subdocuments, so if writing a book and you want to change some layout globally, just edit the styles of the masterdocument. It has been a great help for me when working in larger documentation projects, where one person cannot do it alone, and in the same situation the export to PDF is invaluable.
- and what's that with the programs not working together? It's not very well explained, but if what people mean is just the ability to show a database or spreadsheet or drawing in a document, in an editable manner, they should look at the "Insert" and find OLE Objects, it works like a charm for me.
- I've seen many other complaints that I don't recognize that I don't remember right now.
Anyway back to the actual topic, I believe we'll see Thunderbird changing shape a bit, you gotta remember who expressed their support of OOo not long ago. I know some people can't stand it for its interface, but if you compare Outlook with IBM's Lotus Notes, Outlook has a long way to go before it's production ready. IBM wouldn't mind making an open competitor to their own client, as long as they can sell the Domino servers to run the groupware/database features.
It's true that with OOo and Thunderbird's plugin architecture, you would soon see it supporting other groupware solutions, but there's a long way to go before they get better than IBM in that game.
But of course, it'll take a little while before Thunderbird can reach Outlook, as it is now, it is as said, only a competitor to Outlook Express. It would have made more sense if it could have been Ximian/Novell Evolution getting integrated with OOo, but I'm afraid MS wouldn't let Novell participate... MS have done much to avoid competition on Office already, just read the EULA of Visual Studio.
You seem to forget that Trusted Computing, once enabled and put into effect is a white list rather than just some "bonus" software you get to be allowed to run. You should know that as a used-to-be FOSS fanboy.
On the performance things and so on, I have no comments, as I have only little XP, and no Vista, experience what so ever. But I do agree, DRM used correctly wouldn't be that bad, except that I wouldn't be able to use a legitimate version of it, but content providers have already proven that they're not mature enough for such a tool.
Absolutely correct, it's very much what "trusted computing" was/is all about.
And I don't like the idea that some single organization or individual, other than myself, should be able to control the white list of what can be run on my computer.
But if, on the other hand, I can privately white list something for execution and it was possible for anyone to become an online white list provider, like anyone can set up a homepage, my opinion on the matter would change drastically. Because then I can choose who to trust.
But of course such liberty to make your own decisions is a security breach only helping malware and terrorists. In other words, such a system could never be 100% trusted.
I think it depends on the purpose of the system. If I have an application that requires perhaps Perl and an Oracle server, then I don't need to mention the layers below when asking for those requirements to be met.
In the same way, when releasing a user space application, it may require the Linux kernel, or it may require a UNIX/POSIX environment, which does not specifically require GNU to be used. Most people would want Linux because of it's hardware support, why should they care about GNU to provide the user space tools in between their hardware and their desktop?
Only few lives under pure capitalism, just like only few live under pure communism.
And the lawyer thing is primarily an American phenomenon.
Not sure if parent was a joke, but i found it funny.
In some EU countries economic cars have less yearly tax already, I think it's calculated from the CO2 emission pr. km.
And cars that can't perform 15km/l or more, have had their price tax raised, while longer running ones have had it reduced.
If there's an offset it would only take 3 originals to know which parts of them are tampered with, and what data should be used to produce the original file. If there's no offset it's actually more difficult to cloak the watermark completely, as the watermarks may have similarities which cannot be filtered out. If you expect this combining to occur, you could calculate a matrix system in them, so that by identifying those similarities in the resulting file, they could point out which two were combined. By adding dimensions to the matrix they can then increase the number of originals required to cloak the watermark enough to hide your tracks. The size of the watermarks increases exponentially, so it wouldn't be long before they need longer music tracks to keep them in.
However, I do like this better than DRM, as long as it doesn't affect the sound, of course it can be abused in a way so you're not even allowed to accidentally drop your optic media, as it may place a scratch in the watermark. But if they do it good the first time, it can also be quite scratch resistant.
This is an unfair game. I mean how much have a Windows user actually used Linux? While Linux users could most often go take a seat as a Windows sysop from day to day, with no training needed, because Windows is practically impossible to avoid when being an IT professional, unless you run your own business or other exceptions like that.
There's some truth in Linux not being easy to apply future drivers to, and you got to know the version and you won't find drivers for a legacy kernel. The solution is to update the kernel, and all the drivers will be built in, of course most modern distros makes that awfully easy, so the gradual upgrading of Linux saves it on that point. Linux is hostile to vendors, or maybe i should call it "not very encouraging", so community shouldn't whine when vendor support is lacking, instead applaud when a few vendors actually dare to step up to the task.
On the other hand, there's also hardware that won't work under Windows 2000, not only have MS cut support of this great OS, but I believe they also do their best to fight that any "new" technologies finds their way back to good old 2000, they've done it before, and it often has to do with USB and standard drivers. I'm thinking of how there's no UVC driver for Win2k and how the USB Mass Storage driver is not available to all versions with USB support, even though those versions of Windows were supported at the time it came around.
But the argument that cannot be disputed is that, if you happen to run short of a functionality you need, you have all the options you don't want as an end user: develop it yourself, rant about your desire and hope for mercy from developers or do the simplest and most common thing, wait until someone gets that bright idea and make the feature you long for. Users today have been lulled into sleep and wouldn't think about suggesting their ideas to the developers, nor would they think of or be able to afford to hire a developer, to do the development for them. Which both would be valid contributions to community, but for people to contribute in ways like that, it has to be as easy as click-type-send almost like the automatic bug reports, perhaps even with the possibility of putting more weigh behind the wish by donating 2, 5 or 10 euro.
Of course it would seem a little silly to have such a system built into the system in the beginning, with such a limited user base with such a high percentage of developers, but I believe it'd attract its actual audience.
Regarding the article, I've tried to say it before, but was voted overrated, I do not approve pirated software, even amongst those who can't afford the expensive packet, as long as there are free alternatives of adequate quality. And if students are to be taught about some particular software, their academy must borrow it to them, or the software house may actually give it to them for free (to get some free future marketing), even if that fails, I'm a living example that you can take a MS Office exam preparing only with OpenOffice.
Regarding Mythbusters, you've got to give them that they often do revisit their results, once enough people have disputed it at their homepage, and they do not keep it a secret that they're not scientists, and that their approach is about making such subjects entertaining. It's true that many things could be done on paper, it's just not everything that can be explained in 20 seconds so that everybody would understand the formulas at work. On the other hand, many of the big science names in history just observed reality without knowing the math on beforehand, and many of them did create false assumptions along the way. To me Mythbusters are about challenging the viewer, somehow provoking by their always conclusive results and you've got to admit, you want to watch it go boom as well.
So one should carry their nmap scanner visible while online? Or how are those "guns in public" laws of the US? Besides in many countries you can be punished for offending people by the way you act or appear in public, just like many countries would put drunkards in detention should they get a little too drunk for public eyes. In other words, I'd be sad to give up both freedom and privacy, just to simplify the rules.
Some regulation on developing/publishing/possessing point-and-click exploiting or virus-creation tools would make much more sense than banning proof of concept and investigation tools, the latter requires one to know what one is doing, thus one cannot deny intent. The problem is just where's the line between tool and toy? Who would define the baseline user? I mean to me, using tools, like nmap and hping, feels as natural as word processing does to others.
Sounds so, it's a pity, but predictable, that DRM is, in this case as well as many others, producing worse original products than the pirated. Imagine if Chinese copies of brands were of better quality than the ones from the source... I'd want a Lolls Loyce then, despite the bad spelling. A scenario that deserves some concern.
Sure they are illegal, if not wrapped up properly, however, nVidia's common driver platform is designed to be wrapped up with gluecode, and so their gluecode is opensource for Linux, thus legal. Some may say it's a dirty trick, but i believe many corporations says the same about not being able to write drivers for a GPL'ed kernel without revealing their secrets. This fight between community and corporations is not benefitting anyone, is it? Of course no one should steal code, that'd be unfair, but I vote for equal freedom for all.
Linux is "just" the kernel
and GNU is what makes it useful.
But, I gotta agree that it seems unnecessarily confusing using that as the name of the system, especially if you want to promote the use of this great software combination. Because by consequently using the GNU/Linux term, you make people feel stupid and start telling the history of the OS already before they get started, it would be like if you had to say DOS/Windows or NEXT/MacOS each and every time you mention it.
I don't think it looks or sounds retarded, my only issue with it is relevance, because the people, to which this information matters, knows perfectly well what GNU is and the philosophy behind it.
So I'm a supporter of FOSS which is not only free and open about software, but also open to outsiders and new users, not trying to isolate itself into its core user base of developers and idealists. I also welcome commercial/closed source software for the platform, also closed source drivers, it's the freedom of choice for the developers of this kind of software, what license they choose for their own work, of course they must comply with the licenses of what they use to create this software, that's the rules of the copyright game. Then let the users be free to choose whether to use this commercial/closed source software or use the open alternative, to me the freedom of the platform is for everyone, whether they're open or closed source developers or end users.
All I'm saying is that by just using the term Linux, it all seems much more accessible, let people get introduced to the community and its history at their own pace, it may benefit FOSS as a whole.
There's several brands of tobacco, there's radio stations which doesn't play anything but top 40 and there's several kinds of Operating Systems.
If absolutely need a commercial-grade product, there's Solaris, if they can tolerate just a bit less commercial product there's OpenSuSE, if they want it easier there's Ubuntu, unfortunately MacOS X is still tied to its hardware, but that's also a fairly priced product in itself.
For a normal internet and document editing workstation, there's plenty of options, even OpenOffice won't take much longer to get used to than a new version of MS Office, the only truly addicted people are the gamers, which could just get a console, as that's where games belong, the problem about the consoles is just that the prices on new games are outrageous as well.
My point is that perhaps 70% of all Windows consumers are actually just psychologically addicted, just like some have a habit of eating excessive amounts of fat foods, and some would choose the car for a one mile trip that they could easily go by bike. The monopoly in this case is in the minds of people, it's not like there's no alternatives, there's plenty.
Don't worry it won't happen, such a move from science to politics is very rare. But turning politics into science/knowledge/common sense is, as you mention, quite common... the fears of terrorism, smokers and global warming just to mention a few recent cases.
You're right in that what's currently used for digital cable and satellite TV feeds hasn't been cracked. But this has a history, at least in Europe, of being cracked, holes found in the algorithms and all sorts of fun, then 6 months after it gets public known they change encryption system, and the TV pirates can start over. The encryption systems have in that way gotten so tough to crack that the pirates have found other ways, the most common way to get around the encryption today, is to get a receiver of which you can replace the firmware, and in that way get the receivers to share the smartcards with each others over the internet, for the time being the TV providers knows it's happening, but they fail to figure out how to prevent it, so instead they spread rumours that their encryption providers in Israel are able to detect when cardsharing occurs, but I have yet to hear about them catching anyone in that way.
I would find it a step back if my mobile couldn't do video calls. Besides the 384kbit/s is really a treat when hooking up my laptop through bluetooth in a matter of seconds. Of course a dedicated UMTS modem would pull 3Mbit/s outta the air, but then it can't do anything else, I wouldn't like to carry around all kinda devices just to be hooked up in an instant.
Alright then, lets compare the Java and .NET Documentations
( VS.71).aspx
.NET reference, and one result in Java: java.awt.dnd
.NET gives me System.ComponentModel.Design, System.Drawing.Design, System.ServiceProcess, System.Web.UI and System.Windows.Forms
.NET it's easy to rule out System.ServiceProcess and System.Web.UI
.NET and java.awk on Java. Keep in mind that a search with no possible matches takes shorter time than those with useless matches, that doesn't reveal that they're useless from the start. Seeing the java.awk as the first useful result, with Java, I would probably go for that one, even though it resembles writing windows applications in C++ using the default Windows API, with lots of work and slow progress. I'm not the impatient kind, but I'm rather sure my employer would like more action for his money.
First off trying to find the user interface namespaces, we have the two class overviews:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/
and
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d11h6832
If one have no prior knowledge of any of the two, one would probably probably start off searching for GUI on the page, no result on the
So, let's go look closer at java.awt.dnd before ruling it out, even tho I can see this is just something drag'n'drop, it may refer to something more useful, who knows? I continue into DragSource, perhaps it can tell me exactly what kind of objects are used for this? From there I find something about a serialized form, being perhaps 30 pages of not so relevant text, and java awt.GraphicsEnvironment, which seems like some sort of rules for a canvas. So I would at this point give up and return to the overview.
(in fact I would really give up just seeing the description of java.awt.dnd but if i didn't go there in this experiment I'd be accused of not trying hard enough)
Okay so the next thing so search for on the overviews would be "Graphical User Interface"... alright, same results as with GUI... Then how about "User Interface"? Alright now something happens (and by knowing where I should be going I also know that I am now on the right way). The Java overview gives me java.awt, java.swing.plaf.basic, java.swing.plaf.metal and java.swing.plaf.multi , while the
From the descriptions it's difficult to sort out any of the results from the Java reference, while in the
Looking a little closer on my findings I rule out whatever says "custom", because noone starts out with GUI by customizing widgets, and the java.swing.plaf.* seems not very useful for my purpose, looking at their content of Interfaces and Classes, however being on the right path it wouldn't take long from there to find the generic swing namespace.
So the first useful results from the two would be System.Windows.Forms on
So I'll keep my first statement, Java is tricky to learn if you're on your own, with nobody to point out where to look and what to use. It is my experience that the tutorials available for Java starts with "Hello World" in a terminal, then without explaining what happens in between, they jump to some template project where you are just to handle those objects the template has laid out for you. And those covering more advanced projects usually features only code examples of a few useful features, while the text refers to objects like you "of course" have done that before even starting to read. It appears to me as a gap in what's available, the documentation refers to inside understandings, that I can't get without attending courses. This is most likely because Java is what's most commonly used in education to explain OOP, I learned OOP through C++ (which can also be a b*tch to learn from reference) so I don't know all those inside jokes the documentation refers to, there's too much of-course-you-know's as a result of a very widespread use in education, and I don't have 3, 6 or 9 months to learn a language, as I did during my education. To me it just doesn't seem very accessible.
Well you've got a few points, I hate excessive unordered documentation, I'm no good at reading it from one end to another, so I need to be able to cut to the bone in a matter of minutes. MSDN is very good at that with C#/.NET even though i use mono (mono-doc is also great but of course MS's is more complete). CPAN is also good at cutting to the bone in minutes. I have looked at the Java documentation, so I guess it's basically my inability to navigate it that has made me think otherwise.
But I'm sorry that I cannot take your "not being a real developer" seriously. An IDE is, as another comment states, a tool of productivity, no company would like to pay for the time I would need to learn it using just a text editor with syntax highlighting, managing makefiles, deployment folders and so on manually. So basically I stick to IDE's whenever it's not prototyping in Perl or Python, or making obscurely optimized code in C, Pascal or ASM, where I need to know exactly what's going on.
But on the other hand, you're right, I am rather green, I've only got 14 years experience (out of my 25 years long life) in programming just about anything in a number of languages I've lost count of. I have to mention that I haven't been professional for much more that 6 years, the first 8 years I was just curious and had time to learn from scratch.
btw. Thanks to MemoryDragon, I'll have a look at Netbeans and maven2.
This one is simple; because Java is not.
While I've generally been able to adopt just about any other language over a weekend, Java seems to be my everest. Perl has CPAN and languages like Delphi and C# have (perhaps excessive) frameworks/repositories following them, Java can do just about nothing on its own, if I want to develop a GUI application, I'd first need to do some heavy research just to get started, I've heard Swing is the word for GUI, but I have no clue how to get it into my Eclipse, which i think is perhaps the most complete opensource IDE available, but it also seems that there's a million other alternatives, and what's worse, they don't necessarily work alike, there's not really a common codec of how to make GUI, while with mono I can choose GTK# or wx.NET and get going right away because most of the same things are called the same, and the row of order and input/output is almost the same.
Just a central directory for Java classes, or whatever they're called (just to confuse programmers), like Perl's CPAN, with just basic documentation and a human readable descriptions, would make me reconsider picking up Java, but as it is now, it's a pile of code I have no chance to get a greater picture of.