Is that mozilla on a P133 w/32? I've seen it on a Windows 95 box (my mother got mozilla'd) and it is too slow there for my liking though she can use it once she is patient. I wouldn't like to see her trying OpenOffice on that box (so I guess I better give her a new box:-)
Hmmm, StarOffice seems to take an eternity to load, but once loaded it runs fine (not stellar performance, but perfectly acceptable), and mozilla is getting close to responsive (some moments but....). Now this is on a PIII 500 laptop with 280M of RAM running Debian testing with kernel 2.4.16 with the pre-emptable patch (with 64M the thing struggled with mozilla or OO and especially both). Is this an unreasonable spec to run PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE? Mozilla is 0.9.6 and expects 3 more releases before version 1 (and about 4 months of time) and in the previous 4 releases and months the reponsiveness has really improved. OpenOffice is about where mozilla 0.9.1 was IMHO. What do you want from pre-release software, performance that does nothing, or relative completeness with slow performance, I know what I want and I am looking forward to version 1 of both (even if OpenOffice calls it version 700 or something similar). I'm running them both on hardware which is really about 3 Years old and I say that Hardware depreciates currently in at most 3 Years, so anyone hoping to use worse hardware to run the latest software should now that they are asking to be smacked about the place vis-a-vis performance (could a web browser for the current net really be light-weight enough to run on a PII266 w/32M?)
Yep, the rest of the world could easily ignore the US money if it is more trouble than it's worth (for example if they had to install back door software on all their systems if they want to trade to the US). Also can the US survive without exports? NO, they would end up with an incredibly weak dollar which wouldn't allow them to buy outside the US! The rest of the world can survive without the US (it would take a little adjustment like always flying Airbus) but the US would crumble and die without the imports/exports, sweatshops, illegal immigrants etc.
Whatever plain text I choose to let leave my control can be "tapped" but if I don't want people to see something I will be able to stop it. I could always do some tunneling around a few boxes so the plain text appears from some different box. Now if I live in the US I could have to break the law to do this the way things are going (i.e. Linux will have to distribute the kernel in binary with appropriate backdoors for the US government if he doesn't leave the US).
I don't expect Norton etc. to to release two versions, I expect someone to release one version they do not sell in the US (or any other country who decides to let the FBI in). As for the FBI not spying outside the US, don't make me laugh! Am I going to settle for that as protection? Are the German government (about the most vocal Europeans regarding the dangers of running US software)?
Sometimes the UScentricities of/. just make me ROFL!
All that is happening here is that
All non-US parties will purchase non-US anti-virus software losing the US anti-virus software produces $xxxxxxxxxx/annum and meaning the US software will have a smaller user base and be more likely to be less secure
Every US citizen will have to decide whether to break the law (cause I believe they will outlaw the use of anything which cannot be cracked by the FBI, including all the non-US anti-virus products) or to leave themselves vulnerable
The US will spend a massive amount of resources on trying to control this whole issue. The filtering of the Net would be an immediate requirement to try and find people who are using illegal software, or downloading it
MY OS will NEVER be vulnerable!! I will always, from some day about 3 years ago, use an OS which is Free where the code can be reviewed, modified and distributed. I can attach hooks into my TCP-IP stacks, network device drivers or any other level I wish to watch for the FBI (or anyone else) trying to track me (or gather any info) and block them at source, but I won't need to cause a 17 year old scandinavian will release a tool to do it for me which will be plastered over the non-US internet
The US is well on its way to writing itself out of the rest of the world, and whatever they believe they can't survive alone!
The problem with the BSD approach of "people should be free" is that it gives people the freedom to destroy the work upon which they are building. What if MS had realised early enough that the Internet was the Next Big Thing and had incorporated the BSD TCP-IP stack in from Dos 3 (for example) but they had modified it slightly so you could work on the MSNet or the Internet? Who would have won the war? Would the net have split? It seems ridiculous now, but then it could have been fiery if they had done early enough!
The GPL is far more than a BSD licence, it imposes a simple (in theory and concept but maybe not practice yet) set of rules which say that anyone who receives the work under it cannot undermine the project by releasing closed incompatible versions. What if MS now pick up Ogg Vorbis and use a minorly modified but incompatible version for their prefered audio format from now on? These new users will be orphans from the existing user base, benefiting from its work, but unable to benefit from the Freedom they would have had were it still GPL. So BSD does not make people free past one generation (each BSD receiver is free to do what they want, but their users are not free) whereas the GPL makes the software Free and all the users free, the developers are as Free as is possible while preventing them from having the opportunity of reverting some of the benefits of the Freedoms the GPL is designed to uphold.
In the UK they have a very strange TV presenter called Jeremey Clarkson who came to fame as an over the top presenter on TopGear. For a short while he had a "chat show" where he would take a small part of each show to do something silly and extreme including making ice cream with Liquid Nitrogen! It was hilarious, simple, effective and brilliant, now if only I still worked at tarrc where their was a plentiful supply of liquified chemicals:-)
I was waiting for my memory to arrive for my Gateway Solo 2550 to take it from 64Mb to 320Mb to see if that sorted out most of my workability problems with my Debian testing with OpenOffice system but then I went f-it and tried compiling this preemptable patch again (can't remember what happened last time, think it would go onto a debian kernel-source).
I am now sitting at my newly booted 2.4.16 kernel in mozilla, launching star office while listening to XMMS and the system is still incredibly reponsive. I know I might have compromised peak potential of the box for this responsiveness but for a laptop (and probably any desktop I use from now on) this is a major breakthrough! I Love it. Lets hope it doesn't kill me with any bugs:-)
Mine just died on me:-( The hard disk has failed with one of those nice click-click-click sounds. A word of warning, when I went to try and get some support about this I was told to write in French (I'm in Ireland) so I wrote to the US instead and got no reply.
The machine was good while it lasted with easy use under Linux (2.4.9+ but 2.4.11 for easy use cause they forgot to mention the config before then) and Windows. The only problem was 6Gb just wasn't enough by a long way. I now have the chance to return the unit for a full refund and I think I will to get something bigger.
Great idea, pity it only lasts two months (yep I know I was probably unlucky but so be it)
Define political censorship? Is removing bad language political censorship or just social engineering? Does it make any difference? Is any censorship acceptable? Censorship of the form "you can't show this before 9pm" is ok in my book, but censorship of the form "you can't show this" is not. I don't care why some corpolitical entity wants to limit what we can broadcast, all I care about is making sure they fail in their efforts! From what I have seen of US TV it is repugnantly censored to ensure that nothing which might disturb the foundations of the political system is shown (MTV JackAss is about the only one I can think of that breaks this). As another poster mentions, Michael Moorer has to tip-toe around with what he can and can't show, try contrasting that with Mark Thomas (in the UK) who destroys anyone and anything that deserves it (from the leading politicians for not declaring their interests to the Church for investing in arms manufacturers). Now then who has no political censorship?
Let me also add my vote for these guys. They have the right idea and business model (imho) where they simply resell domains through an automated system for a tiny cut. Domains cost 12 Euros per annum (.com,.net,.org) and that includes the ability to use an email forwarding and web forwarding service or even to edit your own zone (but no sub-domains at the moment). I chose them (along with some friends of mine) for the seeming perfection of the legal side of things and between us we have over 100 domains (maybe more like 2-300) and no complaints.
Still paying some monkeys like NSI to host your new domains? Then get a life and a brain and stop! For existing domains however, I hope you are a masocist as NSI seem to be just plain nasty about everything to do with stopping giving them money (unlike gandi who couldn't care less what you do and provide straight forward ways to do it all)!
The closest to a complaint I have had about gandi was that when someone set up a new domain with a wrong email address, we had to send passport shots AND a copy of the marraige cert to confirm the person had changed their name! Personally I thought this was great! True reassurance that theys guys are diligent (as if the site and srvice didn't give that away).
My apologies to any other registrars who are as good, but I don't know or have experience of any! And btw I have zero affiliation with gandi except that I register domains there.
You are not in fact funny but insightful! I know I will be waiting to find a trace of this virus on a non-US computer of mine, and then I will be going to whatever court neccessary to sue for harrasment, espionage, system corruption and power/bandwidth/cpu theft! I just hope they don't find a way to discriminate IPs by country! Now do you think I would be visiting an Irish court, an EU court or a UN court? If they try to roll this out and start hitting half the PCs on the planet they will have a true war on their hands (I imagine some less legally minded people would create an anti-virus which waits to see the virus try to get in and if it ever appears it dedicates a small chunk of the machine (maybe as much as the virus would consume) to joining a DDOS on the originator! Someone might even send the anti-virus as a virus to get the whole ball rolling. Will the FBI just use more and more money to try and sift through the rubbish data and packets bringing their system to its knees as 50 million would be targets get medieval on their ass?
I actually left the film thinking that they weren't going to bother making the other films because they didn't really give any background (though they left a couple of out-of-place uncontextualised scenes like the London Zoo incident which would be "required" for future films). So much time (that you splet through and my chair kept me awake for) was spent on nothing throughout the film that could have been used to provide the sort of flesh the book gives for background. Instead of a build of of charector and ambiance they chose to have the effects shots they liked and the bare minimum of any plot devices required to get the film from a to b (for example why not drop Quidditch entirely from this film, it only served to shed some light on the Snape/Quirrell issue that was covered without the Quidditch better than most of the rest of the films plot issues?)
While it is true that a few things might be useful further down the road, if kids detest this film like I think they will then it's not going to matter cause they won't even finish film 2 (and I hope they don't so someone will have a hope of going back to them in 5-10 years and doing it well).
Well I notice one has introduced themselves already but here is another! I have read the first two books (in the last fortnight) and went to see the film on Friday evening, I give it 2 out of 10 and it only gets any marks for some cartoon style ingenuity in the special effects of broom flying. The film is a dog pure and simple. After I read the book but before seeing the film I was discussing with someone the underlying problems they would have with time, the problem is they seem to have resolved this problem by chopping out anything that might possibly be ommitted and then rewriting some of what remains to make something close to a plot. They neither remained faithful to the original book or strived to create a new route throught the same plot. Let me give you an example (SPOILER ALERT for the very ignorant):
At the end of the film we see three of the four tables leaping around to celebrate the victory of Griffendor House while the Slys are sitting down? Why? It is completely unexplained by the films content (though it is clear in the book).
The whole film is slow, boring (if the seat I had been in was confortable I would have been out cold) and disjointed. It left me incredilbly unsatisfied. To put this into context, I was expecting to have a bunch of complaints about the film but to feel it was a harmless, fun kids film at the end of the day but I actually left it thinking that what had happened was as follows:
When half the book was filmed near verbatim they realised they already had a 2-3 hour film so some idiot just chopped out as much plot and scenes as possible so they had to reshoot as few scenes as possible (Hagrids dragon seems like a clear example of this) and then finished the film. Then they realised they were still looking at 3+ hours so they whittled away (leaving all the effects they had spent so much money on like the relatively loooong approach to Hogwarts in the boats) until they finally got to what they released.
And my final counterpoint (to the original review) would be that the child actors as a rule were terrible. Ron and Neville (who had nearly nothing to do but look dumb a few times) were ok, but Harry, Hermione, the Twins and Draco were brutal and derivative (we have seen these very same child performances a million times before, we all no what bad child acting is).
I can't believe I am bothering to bitch about this, but I still can't believe a single favourable review has been received for this film as I am sure it will dog in the box office (too long for kids and too crap for adults). Can anyone explain to me something I missed (like the director is deaf-dumb-blind) which should excuse this crap?
Some pages will always be free to view (gnu.org, microsoft.com, irlgov.ie)
Some sites will always be more expensive to view (I don't want to think about what the most expensive pron site would be)
The author has control over their data and can't be forced into a pricing system
Everyone would go mad if we had a pop-up asking us about the microcharge for the next page every-time it is different to the last one (and parents would go nuts trying to let their kids view any pay site without holding their hand every second (not all parents are *nix admins:-)
Move along, nothing to see here!
To rewrite the above question the way I'd like it asked:
What operating systems and platforms do you personally use and which ones do you also use (and why)?
Do you run a common environment on all your machines (in as far as possible) or do you run different things in different places and which environments do you prefer for what?
What development tools do you use (especially for the kernel), would you do anything differebtly for the kernel (like make it compile with other compilers) if you could (or will you) and would you like to (or will you) place the Linux stable kernel into CVS or another version control system?
Do you feel any personal preferences for anything might actually be in anyway reflected in your work as the stable kernel maintainer?
Do you have a good lawyer? Are you planing on travelling to the U.S.A. (for all I know you live there, excuse my ignorance:-)? Have you experience dealing with politicians, business leaders and large groups and do you see this as a part of your job description?
When you stop maintaing the stable kernel, what would you like people to be saying about your reign?
So all we need now is for Sadam to launch a Nuclear missile and a massive fire to wipe out half the planets petroleum. Maybe then the U.S. will stop behaving like big babies who are in fear of losing their toys!
While I agree with you about Open Source Windows, I do think this is part of the only answer! My decision would be to make MS publish the source to every product they have released and to grant free use of all their currenly disclosed IP. Then forbid them from releasing or discussing any products or gathering any income for at least 3 years (they can support their users but all source must always be disclosed for these products). When MS are finally allowed to release a new product the market will have recovered from their stranglehold and all users will be evaluating the worth of the work and how it will work with their setups. The final part of my judgement would be the specification of penalties for non-compliance ($1million/day/MB of undisclosed binary, $5 billion + all income for any relase, $1 million penalty on top of any income gathered per incident). Now if they don't play fair they go bankrupt before the period is over (if my figures are any good, but I haven't looked into them) and if they do play fair they are just a big software house with money in a real market where they have to have something to sell.
Whether the samba project would be hurt or not by the proposed settlement is one issue I will leave to the people who can say IAAL. But I think the real point is that the wording of the quoted section suggests that things like samba would benefit from the settlement and that this is one of the proposed "penalties". With the gaping holes created by the lack of any real definition of what is covered by the penalty, they are pointing out that this penalty is ineffecting and should be ignored (and hence they haven't got what they say they've got in the settlement). Samba are perfectly entitled to point out to the judge their concerns over the wording of the settlement and the implications it could have for them as an interested third party (because while the aim of anti-trust may be to protect the consumer, it should not be doing it at the expense of unrelated innocent third parties or pretending they are doing it for their benefit when they are not).
If any settlement does go ahead we should slashdot whatever US official buidlings we can find with copies of the page from slashdot announcing the settlement and requesting comments. I reckon the page would probably top the hof anyway, but if everyone used it to say their problems it could be massive, so a single copy could be 50-100-1000 pages depending on the threshhold:-) I would enjoy delivering that to the US embassy here in Dublin Ireland to see what they make of it!
The really sad bit is I think this is a joke that would no longer (911) be seen as funny (and yes a slashdot rantfest is hardly the ideal pov to present but it would be "Insightful", "Informative", "Funny" and "Interesting").
Personally I want it to be stable (that is a comment about me not Transmeta:-)! For a lot of tasks CPU speed is an issue, but for many, many, many other tasks it is a complete non-issue. I still see Transmeta having a role in the world, I just don't think they have really started yet, they are waiting for everyone to catch up to the point where Crusoes are what you want! Take routers as a simple example, I would love a Transmeta powered router upon which I can run my choice of i386 OS (and is there not a Linux distro for the native command set of the crusoe?). I know it will be a long, long time before I can afford to buy a bigger pipe than I could saturate with IpSec connections being handled by a "slow" procesor like a Crusoe is at the moment.
Not releasing a commodity system using the Crusoe is costing Transmeta dearly! You would think a company that hired the most famous proponent of the Bazaar software development model would have realised the advantage of placing their hardware in the hands of all who wanted it (the enthusiasts). How many Crusoe suitable projects are going to be developed by closed shops and how many would be started by hackers.
The crusoe seems to be a very good idea because of its potential for embedded markets (and I strongly believe the PC market is going embedded over the next 10 years). Over a 10 year period we might expect to see 64GHz processors, 4GB memory modules and Gb wireless networking and it is in this market that Crusoe will shine as a 2-16GHz processor with an intelligent power management system and hardware-software control (who better to do Bochs/VmWare than transmeta via on chip software which optimises itself to how you actually use the processor). Imagine adding this 16GHz processor and a 1GB memory module to a basic board at the equivalent price you could put together a 66-500MHz Processor with 128Mb ram now. It is getting into the realm where it can handle "anything" on chip, I'm thinking TV/Video as a top power user for anything with a display. We talk of how we have computers in everything and how they will all be "online parts of our digital homes" but is the idea of Free software and its development model not to make it easier to build systems as you will always have less parts to invent so why would these embedded computers run propritary systems when the horsepower will be available in an energy efficient package to allow them to use a general purpose OS and avail of any extra pieces they might like to add (how about in car media players for an easy example, you could use dedicated dsp chips but if you go for a Free software solution you can leave the hooks to ask the question "where do you want to go today"!
The killer aspects I saw of the Transmeta idea were the fact that one CPU could transform from a i386 to an ia64 (whether they did it or not or even if the actual hardware they built could be capable) or some other 32 bit processor and the fact that the CPU could do a lot more in terms of power consumption control than a normal CPU design (thanks to the on chip software). The markets for these features are only starting to develop (the processor morphing ability may never in fact have a market and may simply serve as a method to keep the production price down by keeping the production run as large as possible). Power consumption is going to become a bigger and bigger issue in our lives as time goes by (or we have to really work hard to make sure that whatever country we live in does a good job of hording power and preventing other countries from using any). If we gave a computer to every family on the planet without one tomorrow, how much oil would we need to create the energy? How many nuclear power plants?
Transmeta may well be failing but if they do it will be down to lack of money and poor management that let them set out on the strategy they have persued without the money to back it up. They probably should have kept their mouths shut for another few years to let the problems they could solve develop a bit more, but I've the advantage of hindsight (and I don't think I ever thought about this until now). The idea of Transmeta is right, the time is note quite right and as for the management... God knows! What does this mean for Linux? Nothing! What does this mean for Linus? He will be beating back the propositions from Linux companies who want him on board and hopefully he will decide to step out of a regular job and take some advantage of what he has done to try and do something he sets out to do instead (be it coach a sports team or getting governments to make sense). Linus has deserved the chance to live off all his supporters however directly or indirectly he wants (how long he would deserve to keep doing it if he did it is another matter). I would hope he would do something like take a $n00,000 job with IBM (only because they are in so many pies, no other reason) to do whatever he wants and perhaps go to the IBM AGM/Annual Dinner/Annual Product Briefing if they ask him (i.e. if they think he'd rubbish what they present they won't ask him that year). I'm sure IBM would do it (just what does n =) and I am sure that if he was given free reign with his time he would be a far better person for this planet (cause I know he would never be a force for evil). I worry however that in trying to do the right thing if he parts with Transmeta he may well end up in another job that denies him the total freedom he so richly deserves! Perhaps all the companies making Linux part of their portfolio should consider pledging him a monthly contribution if he ceases full-time employment ($1k each from ibm, sun, sony, sgi, aoltw, redhat, suse, caldera, mandrake, sharp, nokia, creative, nvidia and adaptec would have him living reasonably without hurting any of the companys or us?).
Any sane manufacturer would ship a system with 3 OS installs.
Windows blah
Linux/Hurd/BSD or whatever they like best themselves
Read-only Linux/Hurd/BSD... which is used to verify the hardware is operational and to run utilities on the other OSs like checking the disk or re-installing/ghosting.
Now it could all be done by providing bootable CDs (but what if the CD drive fails) but if you give people the ability to boot a second OS, many people will end up giving it a go and perhaps using it seriously when their windows goes pear-shaped (how many people have you told to re-install windows today?). And as for hardware diagnosis it would be godly for the Dell's of this world who can tell people that "No, your X is working perfectly, I am afraid you will need to fix windows or re-install/restore it from your backup (you do have archived backups from before the problem arose don't you)"
Slashdot Mirror
Is that mozilla on a P133 w/32? I've seen it on a Windows 95 box (my mother got mozilla'd) and it is too slow there for my liking though she can use it once she is patient. I wouldn't like to see her trying OpenOffice on that box (so I guess I better give her a new box :-)
Hmmm, StarOffice seems to take an eternity to load, but once loaded it runs fine (not stellar performance, but perfectly acceptable), and mozilla is getting close to responsive (some moments but....). Now this is on a PIII 500 laptop with 280M of RAM running Debian testing with kernel 2.4.16 with the pre-emptable patch (with 64M the thing struggled with mozilla or OO and especially both). Is this an unreasonable spec to run PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE? Mozilla is 0.9.6 and expects 3 more releases before version 1 (and about 4 months of time) and in the previous 4 releases and months the reponsiveness has really improved. OpenOffice is about where mozilla 0.9.1 was IMHO. What do you want from pre-release software, performance that does nothing, or relative completeness with slow performance, I know what I want and I am looking forward to version 1 of both (even if OpenOffice calls it version 700 or something similar). I'm running them both on hardware which is really about 3 Years old and I say that Hardware depreciates currently in at most 3 Years, so anyone hoping to use worse hardware to run the latest software should now that they are asking to be smacked about the place vis-a-vis performance (could a web browser for the current net really be light-weight enough to run on a PII266 w/32M?)
Yep, the rest of the world could easily ignore the US money if it is more trouble than it's worth (for example if they had to install back door software on all their systems if they want to trade to the US). Also can the US survive without exports? NO, they would end up with an incredibly weak dollar which wouldn't allow them to buy outside the US! The rest of the world can survive without the US (it would take a little adjustment like always flying Airbus) but the US would crumble and die without the imports/exports, sweatshops, illegal immigrants etc.
Whatever plain text I choose to let leave my control can be "tapped" but if I don't want people to see something I will be able to stop it. I could always do some tunneling around a few boxes so the plain text appears from some different box. Now if I live in the US I could have to break the law to do this the way things are going (i.e. Linux will have to distribute the kernel in binary with appropriate backdoors for the US government if he doesn't leave the US).
I don't expect Norton etc. to to release two versions, I expect someone to release one version they do not sell in the US (or any other country who decides to let the FBI in). As for the FBI not spying outside the US, don't make me laugh! Am I going to settle for that as protection? Are the German government (about the most vocal Europeans regarding the dangers of running US software)?
All that is happening here is that
Sometimes I honestly feel pity for Americans!
Traditional Flamebait, traditional response :-)
The problem with the BSD approach of "people should be free" is that it gives people the freedom to destroy the work upon which they are building. What if MS had realised early enough that the Internet was the Next Big Thing and had incorporated the BSD TCP-IP stack in from Dos 3 (for example) but they had modified it slightly so you could work on the MSNet or the Internet? Who would have won the war? Would the net have split? It seems ridiculous now, but then it could have been fiery if they had done early enough!
The GPL is far more than a BSD licence, it imposes a simple (in theory and concept but maybe not practice yet) set of rules which say that anyone who receives the work under it cannot undermine the project by releasing closed incompatible versions. What if MS now pick up Ogg Vorbis and use a minorly modified but incompatible version for their prefered audio format from now on? These new users will be orphans from the existing user base, benefiting from its work, but unable to benefit from the Freedom they would have had were it still GPL. So BSD does not make people free past one generation (each BSD receiver is free to do what they want, but their users are not free) whereas the GPL makes the software Free and all the users free, the developers are as Free as is possible while preventing them from having the opportunity of reverting some of the benefits of the Freedoms the GPL is designed to uphold.
In the UK they have a very strange TV presenter called Jeremey Clarkson who came to fame as an over the top presenter on TopGear. For a short while he had a "chat show" where he would take a small part of each show to do something silly and extreme including making ice cream with Liquid Nitrogen! It was hilarious, simple, effective and brilliant, now if only I still worked at tarrc where their was a plentiful supply of liquified chemicals :-)
I was waiting for my memory to arrive for my Gateway Solo 2550 to take it from 64Mb to 320Mb to see if that sorted out most of my workability problems with my Debian testing with OpenOffice system but then I went f-it and tried compiling this preemptable patch again (can't remember what happened last time, think it would go onto a debian kernel-source). :-)
I am now sitting at my newly booted 2.4.16 kernel in mozilla, launching star office while listening to XMMS and the system is still incredibly reponsive. I know I might have compromised peak potential of the box for this responsiveness but for a laptop (and probably any desktop I use from now on) this is a major breakthrough! I Love it. Lets hope it doesn't kill me with any bugs
Mine just died on me :-( The hard disk has failed with one of those nice click-click-click sounds. A word of warning, when I went to try and get some support about this I was told to write in French (I'm in Ireland) so I wrote to the US instead and got no reply.
The machine was good while it lasted with easy use under Linux (2.4.9+ but 2.4.11 for easy use cause they forgot to mention the config before then) and Windows. The only problem was 6Gb just wasn't enough by a long way. I now have the chance to return the unit for a full refund and I think I will to get something bigger.
Great idea, pity it only lasts two months (yep I know I was probably unlucky but so be it)
Define political censorship? Is removing bad language political censorship or just social engineering? Does it make any difference? Is any censorship acceptable? Censorship of the form "you can't show this before 9pm" is ok in my book, but censorship of the form "you can't show this" is not. I don't care why some corpolitical entity wants to limit what we can broadcast, all I care about is making sure they fail in their efforts! From what I have seen of US TV it is repugnantly censored to ensure that nothing which might disturb the foundations of the political system is shown (MTV JackAss is about the only one I can think of that breaks this). As another poster mentions, Michael Moorer has to tip-toe around with what he can and can't show, try contrasting that with Mark Thomas (in the UK) who destroys anyone and anything that deserves it (from the leading politicians for not declaring their interests to the Church for investing in arms manufacturers). Now then who has no political censorship?
Let me also add my vote for these guys. They have the right idea and business model (imho) where they simply resell domains through an automated system for a tiny cut. Domains cost 12 Euros per annum (.com, .net, .org) and that includes the ability to use an email forwarding and web forwarding service or even to edit your own zone (but no sub-domains at the moment). I chose them (along with some friends of mine) for the seeming perfection of the legal side of things and between us we have over 100 domains (maybe more like 2-300) and no complaints.
Still paying some monkeys like NSI to host your new domains? Then get a life and a brain and stop! For existing domains however, I hope you are a masocist as NSI seem to be just plain nasty about everything to do with stopping giving them money (unlike gandi who couldn't care less what you do and provide straight forward ways to do it all)!
The closest to a complaint I have had about gandi was that when someone set up a new domain with a wrong email address, we had to send passport shots AND a copy of the marraige cert to confirm the person had changed their name! Personally I thought this was great! True reassurance that theys guys are diligent (as if the site and srvice didn't give that away).
My apologies to any other registrars who are as good, but I don't know or have experience of any! And btw I have zero affiliation with gandi except that I register domains there.
You are not in fact funny but insightful! I know I will be waiting to find a trace of this virus on a non-US computer of mine, and then I will be going to whatever court neccessary to sue for harrasment, espionage, system corruption and power/bandwidth/cpu theft! I just hope they don't find a way to discriminate IPs by country! Now do you think I would be visiting an Irish court, an EU court or a UN court? If they try to roll this out and start hitting half the PCs on the planet they will have a true war on their hands (I imagine some less legally minded people would create an anti-virus which waits to see the virus try to get in and if it ever appears it dedicates a small chunk of the machine (maybe as much as the virus would consume) to joining a DDOS on the originator! Someone might even send the anti-virus as a virus to get the whole ball rolling. Will the FBI just use more and more money to try and sift through the rubbish data and packets bringing their system to its knees as 50 million would be targets get medieval on their ass?
I actually left the film thinking that they weren't going to bother making the other films because they didn't really give any background (though they left a couple of out-of-place uncontextualised scenes like the London Zoo incident which would be "required" for future films). So much time (that you splet through and my chair kept me awake for) was spent on nothing throughout the film that could have been used to provide the sort of flesh the book gives for background. Instead of a build of of charector and ambiance they chose to have the effects shots they liked and the bare minimum of any plot devices required to get the film from a to b (for example why not drop Quidditch entirely from this film, it only served to shed some light on the Snape/Quirrell issue that was covered without the Quidditch better than most of the rest of the films plot issues?)
While it is true that a few things might be useful further down the road, if kids detest this film like I think they will then it's not going to matter cause they won't even finish film 2 (and I hope they don't so someone will have a hope of going back to them in 5-10 years and doing it well).
Well I notice one has introduced themselves already but here is another! I have read the first two books (in the last fortnight) and went to see the film on Friday evening, I give it 2 out of 10 and it only gets any marks for some cartoon style ingenuity in the special effects of broom flying. The film is a dog pure and simple. After I read the book but before seeing the film I was discussing with someone the underlying problems they would have with time, the problem is they seem to have resolved this problem by chopping out anything that might possibly be ommitted and then rewriting some of what remains to make something close to a plot. They neither remained faithful to the original book or strived to create a new route throught the same plot. Let me give you an example (SPOILER ALERT for the very ignorant):
At the end of the film we see three of the four tables leaping around to celebrate the victory of Griffendor House while the Slys are sitting down? Why? It is completely unexplained by the films content (though it is clear in the book).
The whole film is slow, boring (if the seat I had been in was confortable I would have been out cold) and disjointed. It left me incredilbly unsatisfied. To put this into context, I was expecting to have a bunch of complaints about the film but to feel it was a harmless, fun kids film at the end of the day but I actually left it thinking that what had happened was as follows:
When half the book was filmed near verbatim they realised they already had a 2-3 hour film so some idiot just chopped out as much plot and scenes as possible so they had to reshoot as few scenes as possible (Hagrids dragon seems like a clear example of this) and then finished the film. Then they realised they were still looking at 3+ hours so they whittled away (leaving all the effects they had spent so much money on like the relatively loooong approach to Hogwarts in the boats) until they finally got to what they released.
And my final counterpoint (to the original review) would be that the child actors as a rule were terrible. Ron and Neville (who had nearly nothing to do but look dumb a few times) were ok, but Harry, Hermione, the Twins and Draco were brutal and derivative (we have seen these very same child performances a million times before, we all no what bad child acting is).
I can't believe I am bothering to bitch about this, but I still can't believe a single favourable review has been received for this film as I am sure it will dog in the box office (too long for kids and too crap for adults). Can anyone explain to me something I missed (like the director is deaf-dumb-blind) which should excuse this crap?
I read it all right, just blanked that part somehow :-) Sorry
Some pages will always be free to view (gnu.org, microsoft.com, irlgov.ie) :-)
Some sites will always be more expensive to view (I don't want to think about what the most expensive pron site would be)
The author has control over their data and can't be forced into a pricing system
Everyone would go mad if we had a pop-up asking us about the microcharge for the next page every-time it is different to the last one (and parents would go nuts trying to let their kids view any pay site without holding their hand every second (not all parents are *nix admins
Move along, nothing to see here!
To rewrite the above question the way I'd like it asked:
:-)
What operating systems and platforms do you personally use and which ones do you also use (and why)?
Do you run a common environment on all your machines (in as far as possible) or do you run different things in different places and which environments do you prefer for what?
What development tools do you use (especially for the kernel), would you do anything differebtly for the kernel (like make it compile with other compilers) if you could (or will you) and would you like to (or will you) place the Linux stable kernel into CVS or another version control system?
Do you feel any personal preferences for anything might actually be in anyway reflected in your work as the stable kernel maintainer?
Do you have a good lawyer? Are you planing on travelling to the U.S.A. (for all I know you live there, excuse my ignorance:-)? Have you experience dealing with politicians, business leaders and large groups and do you see this as a part of your job description?
When you stop maintaing the stable kernel, what would you like people to be saying about your reign?
Linux or BSD
How about Alan Cox? Not visible enough? The BBC just put him on TV but I have never seen Miguel or Marcelo on tv!
So all we need now is for Sadam to launch a Nuclear missile and a massive fire to wipe out half the planets petroleum. Maybe then the U.S. will stop behaving like big babies who are in fear of losing their toys!
While I agree with you about Open Source Windows, I do think this is part of the only answer! My decision would be to make MS publish the source to every product they have released and to grant free use of all their currenly disclosed IP. Then forbid them from releasing or discussing any products or gathering any income for at least 3 years (they can support their users but all source must always be disclosed for these products). When MS are finally allowed to release a new product the market will have recovered from their stranglehold and all users will be evaluating the worth of the work and how it will work with their setups. The final part of my judgement would be the specification of penalties for non-compliance ($1million/day/MB of undisclosed binary, $5 billion + all income for any relase, $1 million penalty on top of any income gathered per incident). Now if they don't play fair they go bankrupt before the period is over (if my figures are any good, but I haven't looked into them) and if they do play fair they are just a big software house with money in a real market where they have to have something to sell.
Whether the samba project would be hurt or not by the proposed settlement is one issue I will leave to the people who can say IAAL. But I think the real point is that the wording of the quoted section suggests that things like samba would benefit from the settlement and that this is one of the proposed "penalties". With the gaping holes created by the lack of any real definition of what is covered by the penalty, they are pointing out that this penalty is ineffecting and should be ignored (and hence they haven't got what they say they've got in the settlement). Samba are perfectly entitled to point out to the judge their concerns over the wording of the settlement and the implications it could have for them as an interested third party (because while the aim of anti-trust may be to protect the consumer, it should not be doing it at the expense of unrelated innocent third parties or pretending they are doing it for their benefit when they are not).
If any settlement does go ahead we should slashdot whatever US official buidlings we can find with copies of the page from slashdot announcing the settlement and requesting comments. I reckon the page would probably top the hof anyway, but if everyone used it to say their problems it could be massive, so a single copy could be 50-100-1000 pages depending on the threshhold :-) I would enjoy delivering that to the US embassy here in Dublin Ireland to see what they make of it!
The really sad bit is I think this is a joke that would no longer (911) be seen as funny (and yes a slashdot rantfest is hardly the ideal pov to present but it would be "Insightful", "Informative", "Funny" and "Interesting").
Personally I want it to be stable (that is a comment about me not Transmeta:-)! For a lot of tasks CPU speed is an issue, but for many, many, many other tasks it is a complete non-issue. I still see Transmeta having a role in the world, I just don't think they have really started yet, they are waiting for everyone to catch up to the point where Crusoes are what you want! Take routers as a simple example, I would love a Transmeta powered router upon which I can run my choice of i386 OS (and is there not a Linux distro for the native command set of the crusoe?). I know it will be a long, long time before I can afford to buy a bigger pipe than I could saturate with IpSec connections being handled by a "slow" procesor like a Crusoe is at the moment.
Not releasing a commodity system using the Crusoe is costing Transmeta dearly! You would think a company that hired the most famous proponent of the Bazaar software development model would have realised the advantage of placing their hardware in the hands of all who wanted it (the enthusiasts). How many Crusoe suitable projects are going to be developed by closed shops and how many would be started by hackers.
The crusoe seems to be a very good idea because of its potential for embedded markets (and I strongly believe the PC market is going embedded over the next 10 years). Over a 10 year period we might expect to see 64GHz processors, 4GB memory modules and Gb wireless networking and it is in this market that Crusoe will shine as a 2-16GHz processor with an intelligent power management system and hardware-software control (who better to do Bochs/VmWare than transmeta via on chip software which optimises itself to how you actually use the processor). Imagine adding this 16GHz processor and a 1GB memory module to a basic board at the equivalent price you could put together a 66-500MHz Processor with 128Mb ram now. It is getting into the realm where it can handle "anything" on chip, I'm thinking TV/Video as a top power user for anything with a display. We talk of how we have computers in everything and how they will all be "online parts of our digital homes" but is the idea of Free software and its development model not to make it easier to build systems as you will always have less parts to invent so why would these embedded computers run propritary systems when the horsepower will be available in an energy efficient package to allow them to use a general purpose OS and avail of any extra pieces they might like to add (how about in car media players for an easy example, you could use dedicated dsp chips but if you go for a Free software solution you can leave the hooks to ask the question "where do you want to go today"!
The killer aspects I saw of the Transmeta idea were the fact that one CPU could transform from a i386 to an ia64 (whether they did it or not or even if the actual hardware they built could be capable) or some other 32 bit processor and the fact that the CPU could do a lot more in terms of power consumption control than a normal CPU design (thanks to the on chip software). The markets for these features are only starting to develop (the processor morphing ability may never in fact have a market and may simply serve as a method to keep the production price down by keeping the production run as large as possible). Power consumption is going to become a bigger and bigger issue in our lives as time goes by (or we have to really work hard to make sure that whatever country we live in does a good job of hording power and preventing other countries from using any). If we gave a computer to every family on the planet without one tomorrow, how much oil would we need to create the energy? How many nuclear power plants?
Transmeta may well be failing but if they do it will be down to lack of money and poor management that let them set out on the strategy they have persued without the money to back it up. They probably should have kept their mouths shut for another few years to let the problems they could solve develop a bit more, but I've the advantage of hindsight (and I don't think I ever thought about this until now). The idea of Transmeta is right, the time is note quite right and as for the management ... God knows! What does this mean for Linux? Nothing! What does this mean for Linus? He will be beating back the propositions from Linux companies who want him on board and hopefully he will decide to step out of a regular job and take some advantage of what he has done to try and do something he sets out to do instead (be it coach a sports team or getting governments to make sense). Linus has deserved the chance to live off all his supporters however directly or indirectly he wants (how long he would deserve to keep doing it if he did it is another matter). I would hope he would do something like take a $n00,000 job with IBM (only because they are in so many pies, no other reason) to do whatever he wants and perhaps go to the IBM AGM/Annual Dinner/Annual Product Briefing if they ask him (i.e. if they think he'd rubbish what they present they won't ask him that year). I'm sure IBM would do it (just what does n =) and I am sure that if he was given free reign with his time he would be a far better person for this planet (cause I know he would never be a force for evil). I worry however that in trying to do the right thing if he parts with Transmeta he may well end up in another job that denies him the total freedom he so richly deserves! Perhaps all the companies making Linux part of their portfolio should consider pledging him a monthly contribution if he ceases full-time employment ($1k each from ibm, sun, sony, sgi, aoltw, redhat, suse, caldera, mandrake, sharp, nokia, creative, nvidia and adaptec would have him living reasonably without hurting any of the companys or us?).
Now it could all be done by providing bootable CDs (but what if the CD drive fails) but if you give people the ability to boot a second OS, many people will end up giving it a go and perhaps using it seriously when their windows goes pear-shaped (how many people have you told to re-install windows today?). And as for hardware diagnosis it would be godly for the Dell's of this world who can tell people that "No, your X is working perfectly, I am afraid you will need to fix windows or re-install/restore it from your backup (you do have archived backups from before the problem arose don't you)"