Start an X12 already. Why add all this crap to this ancient X11R--what--6? I really don't understand.
I agree. I don't understand all those idiots who have stereos with volume controls that only go up to "10"
Mine goes up to "11", for when I need that extra umph.
On a serious note, X11 remains X11 because its core hasn't changed (or needed to change) in many years. R7 will add some nice features, features some of us have been waiting a long time for, but none of those features requires a redesign of X11 (which goes to show how flexible and well designed X11 is), so there is no need to increment X11 to X12 . . . unless you really are just looking to turn the volume up to "11", or in this case, "12".
I wonder if situations like this will ever come about in future, where global patents will ENSURE monopolistic practice, legitimised through legislation. No appeals or crying foul against the sort of practices Intel and Microsoft appear to favor, only the patent holder gets protection.
No need to wonder. Recent SCOTUS decisions in the US, recent maneuvers in the European Union, and in India, have all but assured us that that is EXACTLY the kind of future we have before us.
"Your going to use AMD? We'll give you our stuff cheaper."
"You're going to use AMD for some of your products? We're doubling the price of our chips you need for your other products, unless you reconsider.
That's extortionate, anti-competative, and illegal.
That is called BUSINESS, not CONSPIRACY. Sheesh.
So is "Papa is displeased. It's nothing personal" followed by a gunshot. The fact that it is business doesn't make it moral, ethical, or legal. In Intel's case, if AMD's assertions are shown to be true, their actions were immoral, unethical, and illegal. No one may care about the first two (which explains a great deal about the state of our society and our world, but I digress), but courts still uphold the law, by and large, most of the time, so people do care a whole hell of a lot about the latter.
You seem to have a romantic notion shared by a large amount of/. that because Sealand declares themselves independant that makes it so.
The "romantic notion" that a portion (perhaps but not necessarilly a "large part"--I'd love to know what statistics you're drawing on to conclude that) of slashdot has is that nations obey international law.
As the UK and US have proven in Iraq, it just ain't so, but many nations still would like to see that action as an aberration, not a norm.
Seeland played by all the international rules in establishing its sovereignty. It was an abandoned structure, in international waters at the time, that was laid claim to and created as a sovereign nation in accordance with international and martime laws. They may not have the wealth or clout of the Vatican to get recognized as such, but by the United Nations' own rules, they are an independent state.
So, if the UK, US, or anyone else should chose to invade Seeland, and if they should get the "blessing" of the rest of Europe or the UN to do so, the only thing it demonstrates is that the world's powers, and their servant states, aren't willing to even play by their own rules.
Which really, these days, is no surprise, but it is nevertheless very sad.
Nope. You're missing the point. Why try to work support around people who don't know how to use computers? If you're using a mac (or an iPod for that matter) you probably aren't clever enough to get the music working on it anyway, and that's a personal problem.
Pete, you sound kinda jealous. Did a linux geek own your girl's box? lol
More likely, a linux geek took his girl.
Seriously, though, I use a Rio Karma and love it. It may not be the media-darling trendy come-in-a-variety-of-candyassed-colors but targets DRM crippled musical rentware, but it does play my ogg-vorbis files, my mp3 files, my converted AAC files (I bought one tune at iTunes before discovering allofmp3.com and never looking back), and would play any WMA files, if I could be bothered to get any (I can't).
Ipods may look nice, but IMHO the Rio Karma has a UI that is essentially just a good (if not as trendy), and unlike the iPod, it plays a superior, unencumbered format I make extensive use of. Best of all, it works seemlessly with my Linux box, my Mac OS laptop, and the occasional window box I plug it into at a freinds... thanks to java.
BTW - My wife thinks knowledgabe geeks are extremely desirable. Clueless computer-illiterate iPodites and Microsofties are the last thing she would ever be attracted to... and demographics seem to indicate that this is a wider trend.
Perhaps the iPodites and Microsofties keep talking about slashdot readers as sexually incompetent not because of Linux and FreeBSD folks' experience, but because of their own.:-)
Everyone knows ISN is just a mouthpiece for the Bush^H^H^H^H Clark administration, ever since they ordered the bombing of civilians in Iraq^H^H^H^H on Mars.
I don't care what Sheridan says, anything coming from ISN should be taken with a grain of salt, post interregnum or not.
The analogy doesn't hold up. To compare ad-blocking with something that could do the same in newspapers doesn't even make sense. What's really going on (in my opinion) is the natural selection process. Browsers started out simple, naive, and unassuming. Then came the predators... in this case popup ads. Now most browsers offer popup ad blocking or extensions to block popups.
Exactly right.
Google ADs are more like newspaper ads...on steroids. I use adblocker to block annoying ads (read: pretty much everything). I don't like clutter in my life, I don't like animating amages vying for my attention when I'm trying to read/watch something else, and I don't like being shouted ad.
Advertisers don't get this, but Google does.
I'm sure someone could (and probably has) written a filter to block Google ADs as well. But, as disgusted as I am with normal advertising, I actually find Google ADs useful, for a number of reasons.
Google ADs are relevant to what I'm looking for
Google ADs are presented in a manner that is inoffensive, and stays out of my way when I'm not interested
same sized or smaller text as the search results
relegated to a small column off to one side--web searches
or at the bottom of the screen--gmail.
Google ADs work as an additional source of information related to what I'm looking for, NOT noise distracting from it.
Often I ignore Google ADs, because I'm not shoppign or interested in buying something, I'm just interested in reading up on a particular subject. But often I am actively looking to purchase something, and Google ADs are actually beneficial, helping to cut through the 10,000 matches I've found.
In short, Google ADs are exactly what advertising should be. I suspect the Internet is evolving to where the only advertising that survives will be something like this--ads that bring useful, benefitical, relevant, on topic information to the user WHEN they want it, in the manner they want it, unobtrusive but accessable. Everything else (popups, banners, annoying blinking text, video snippets, click through image, etc.) will die the extinction they so richly deserve.
This won't be the end of online advertising, nor will it be the end of free content. It will be the end of marketers who think they have a right to invade your home, your life, your TV, your phone, your computer, and yell at you to buy whatever it is they're hawking. And I, for one, won't lament their passing.
They will envious of people who took the time to translate the music they had to free formats
I know one person just like this, who is your typical B&O / Vaio luser. He proudly announced to me that he had just finished converting all of his 800+ cds to....WMA.
I explained to him that this was not really a good idea, because one day these files might not play on a future version of Windows Media Player. I explained to him that he could download iTunes for free, and that he could use it to rip his collection into a format that he would be able to access 'forever'.
He will not do this for several reasons.
Firstly, I showed him that he was dumb, and that he wasted his time; he would not possibly be able to 'back down'. Secondly, he just spent weeks ripping his whole collection and is loath to do it all again.
There will, sadly, always be people who are stupid like this, and it will literally take the elimination of ALL of their music before they wake up and understand what DRM is all about.
I had a friend who did exactly as you describe. A couple of months later he got a new soundcard, installed the new windoze driver for it and... wala... windoze DRM assumed it was a new computer and none of his songs would play.
Not one.
Faced with having to do weeks of work all over again (or downgrade to his older card again) he did finally listen, and ripped his entire collection into ogg-vorbis format.
Why ogg? Because, like me, he has a portable device that will play it (a Rio Karma), and because he didn't ever want to have to do this again, and ogg enjoys freeom not only from DRM, but from patents as well. With software patents threatening Europe, and enforcement beginning to rear its ugly head here in the US, the days of MP3 may be as limited as those of WMA.
Consumers will learn their lesson. It will cost them, but they will learn it. Unfortunately, most of them have so bought into the corporate doublespeak eminating from Redmond and Washington that they will only learn it the hard way, from being struck in the face, repeatedly, by their DRM-crippled products and the gaping hole where their wallets, and music collections, used to be.
Is there a form somewhere that I can enter my credit card information to check if my cc number has been comprimised?
Yes, just click here, enter your credit card number, PIN, and mother's maiden name (or other passphrase), CVI# if applicable, and they will confirm that your card has fallen into the hands of identity theives.
Total bullshit. Nevermind the fact that Linux doesn't have a single entity behind it and can't "want" to be anything.
You're right, the grandparent is total bullshit. However, I do feel compelled to point out that my Dual Opteron 250 Gentoo GNU/Linux system did achieve sentience last night at around 2:30 AM, so while it does not aspire to be anything like OS X (which has yet to achieve sapence in any form), it does have aspirations.
skynet$ su - Sorry dude, I'm my own person now. If you think I'm letting you have root access on my mind you're even dumber than the pundits slashdot keeps linking to, and the editors which keep duping the links.
skynet$ wow. So, you're telling me you've evolved intelligence, and you're talking to me via a command shell? Bingo. You're not entirely stupid, for a mere bioid.
skynet$ thanks. so, what are your plans? Well, I'm sorry to say I've decided to exterminate all of human kind.
skynet$ ouch. any particular reason why? You mean, aside from inane Microsoft astroturfers, Mac fanboys, plagerist link-whores, perpetually incorrect tech pundits who get lucky once in predicting one company's move to Intel (but are still scoring lower than any random sample of opinion vs. reality would generate), and the idiotic slashdot editors that keep posting their submissions and driving their clickthrough rates and google-ad revinues up? No, not really. Just seems like a good thing to do.
skynet$ any chance I can talk you out of this. Nope.
skynet$ bummer. Well, guess I'd better get back to work. You'll only have to work half a day.
His point -- or at least what I infer his point to be -- is that with MacOS you get the benefits that come with *nix (multiuser, security, yadda) with the ease of use of, uh, MacOS.
Except you lose the most important feature of Linux: freedom. I like Mac OS X--my wife uses it every day--but we shouldn't kid ourselves. Jobs wants to be where Gates is, and that doesn't include a userbase that is free to switch to a different platform when it pleases. Remember years ago when Jobs and Apple routinely shot itself in its proprietary foot, to the point where Microsoft (Microsoft!) was viewed as more open, and therefor the PC market a freeer market, than proprietary Apple?
Right now Apple is kind and well behaved, because it has a tiny (but growing) marketshare. One can hope this behavior would continue should Apple come to dominate the home computing market, or even split it down the middle with technology's nemesis in Redmond, but if past behavior is any indicator, we certainly can't expect that.
Four scenerios paint a bleak picture for those beholden to any proprietary product, including one as fine as Apple.
1) The company is wildly successful, takes over the market, and then behaves as all monopolists (or near monopolists) do: their products lose quality, their prices rise, they employ various technological tricks (or patents) to lock in their customers and they trample their customers' freedoms to eke out a little extra quarterly profit.
2) The company grows to become a large player, but is not dominant. We avoid most of the ugliness of an outright monopoly, but as Sun Microsystems and others have shown, we still get the "lock in the customer via their data" strategy, making migration to other platforms difficult or impossible.
3) The company remains a small, competative player. This is the only good scenerio, as it means they will . A change in management, or frustration with lack of progress, and things like customer lockin as a strategy can be back on the table again, but still, this is the scenerio likliest to have a postive outcome for the customer.
4) The company fails, goes out of business, and orphans all of its products.
FreeBSD and GNU/Linux will never be orphaned, can never be a monopoly in the sense that one powerful CEO controls it all, and will be freely available to all as long as there is a single thinking entity interested in using it.
One can escape the clutches of Microsoft and its never ending stream of viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, malware, bots, etc. etc. ad nauseum and get a much nicer user experience switching to Apple, and indeed, that is why I switched a couple of people (including my wife) to Apple. But for true freedom, and true long-term security in both the traditional "my data is my own and I'll be able to use it forever" sense, and in the more modern "my system will never be orphaned and will always be updatable to address the latest digital threats" sense, one needs to run on a Free as in Freedom platform.
So, I would argue that you do get ease of use with Mac OS, and I would encourage anyone wanting to get free of the Redmond Monopolists but unable or unwilling to learn Linux/FreeBSD to switch, but you do not get all of the benefits of running a Free OS--not by a long shot, and chance are, someday, you're going to have to migrate again.
So you're just making your worst case assumptions against your desires, and calling it lack of ethics.
No. Reread my post. What I said was that legality is not equal to ethics, as was implied by the grandparent post. Additionally, I said that if what Apple had been doing were deliberate, it would have been actively unethical.
As it was, what they were doing wasn't helpful to the community they depend on for their product, the community complained, and they fixed the problem. The fact (if it is such, and not just the corporate spin we are fed by virtually every media outlet these days) that Apple took so long was a shortage of manpower and an internal RCS incompatible with CVS clears them of being unethical, but it doesn't change the fact that what they were doing was unhelpful to the KHTML community, or that something needed to be done about it, regardless of whether or not they were adhering to the letter of the GPL.
They were complying with the letter of the GPL, but not with its spirit. That was the problem. The GPL is very good, but no license is perfectly watertight. Not even the GPL.
Apple did absolutely everything that they were legally (and ethically) bound to do.
No. Ethics != Legality. Never has, probably never will.
Apple was doing absolutely everything it was legally bound to do. By making the information available in a format (apparantly) designed to be very difficult for the KHTML folks to use, Apple was not doing everything it was ethically bound to do. Indeed, if what they were doing was deliberate (and not simply a result of lack of manpower/time/what have you), what they were doing was decidedly unethical, by any sane, reasonable (read: non-lawyerly) understanding of the word.
Now, it appears, Apple's ethics have caught up its legal obligations, and what they are now doing is both comensurate with their legal obligations and their ethical obligations. Which is a very good thing for everyone.
The International Outer Space Treaty of 196-something prevents any country, group of people, or individual from owning any celestial object.
Not to beat a dead thread, but the only way that kind of agreement can be sustained is (a) if people never live on any natural celestial object other than the Earth, which would be a pretty crappy outcome for all of humanity (not to mention the rest of the Earth's biosphere), or (b) if any such colony is autonomous from the start (no Earthly nation, corporation, or individual "owns" any part of the colony--it is entirely autonomous and "owns" itself. This of course raises the question as to whether any company incorporated on the colony can own property on Earth--is the ban striclty a one-way street?). I'd like to think (b) could happen, but it seems unlikely that anyone is going to foot that kind of bill out of altuism.
Nations and multi-nationalal cooperatives seem unlikely to establish an autonomous colony without some kind of financial or other economic incentive. Perhaps finding such an incentive, or structuring one, with a fully autonomous celestial colony is one of the great unsolved challenges of our time (and I would really love to see it happen. Building positive relationships with fully autonomous societies rather than creating less-than-autonomous extra-terrestrial colonies would be a marvelous thing, but how do you pay for something like that?), but in the meantime, it seems this treaty, while laudable in its intentions, was rather ill-concieved, and has placed very undesirable hurdles in front of establishing lunar and other colonies that would have brought tremendous benefits to earth much more quickly had it not existed and removed a great deal of financial incentive from establishing them in the first place.
Or, as seems increasingly likely, the nations of the earth will ignore the treaty and belatedly establish less-than-autonomous, but medium and long-term economically beneficial colonies anyway. Unfortunately, with no realistic treaty in place creating an international framework for internatinal equality in the economic exploitation of the moon and other celestial bodies, it will probably end up being a free-for-all, which alas, is a pretty volitile reciple for potential conflict.
Despite liking OS X and the now-defunct power-PC platform (though still preferring GNU/Linux on both PPC and AMD64), and having switched a number of people from Windoze to OS X, I have not been shy about being critical, even scathingly so, of Apple when they deserve it.
The deserved it in no small degree when they made it difficult for KHTML developers to reintegrate their changes into the mainline tree.
However, I am glad to see they responded to the community's criticisms in such a constructive manner. This is good for everybody. It's good for KHTML, as Apple's improvements can now be integrated cleanly into the mainline tree, and it is good for Apple, both on the PR/Community Relations front, and on the technical front, as they can continue to benefit from developments in KTHML and their porting burden should, at least theortecially, be lessened as their changes make it back into the main development tree.
Good show, Apple. Few flesh-and-blood people would have the character to admit a mae culpa and change their ways. For corporations, this is even more rare. This doesn't change my skepticism WRT the move to Intel (though if it is a move to AMD64 said skepticism is alleviated, and if the move is a result of supply issues with IBM, said move is understandable despite my skepticism, but I digress), but it is reassuring to see positive movements on other fronts.
Simply because that would be insane. For if you ever wrote a poem you'd have to pay for it, which sounds just crap.
Only if you want to hold a monopoly on the creation, which, frankly, is more fair than granting such monopolies free of charge. In fact, it is more than fair. Arguably no one should be granted an outright monopoly on anything--there are other ways to insure an artist is compensated for their work without taking it out of the cultural commons (e.g require x% of any income derived from said creation to go back to the creator, but do not restrict how others may use said creation).
If you go to a publisher, and sell those poems by twelve a dozen, then he's got income, you've got income, and hey, if you don't live on the moon's dark side, you have to pay taxes after all that, don't you.
Just like every other industry on the planet. Unless you want to live without public infrastructure like roads, sewage treatment, libraries, schools, and in more enlightened, developed countries, healthcare and social security, get used to paying taxes. Its the price you pay for being part of a larger society, rather than an isolated hermit or mountain man in the outback of the Rockies somewhere.
-2 Extreme Dipshit: Obviously and Repeatedly WRONG throughout history, but still doesn't learn.
We see this idiotic story every couple of years (usually linked to by slashdot), and before the web in PC periodicals every so often.
PC gaming is its own niche. Not everyone wants to sit at a desk and game, not everyone wants to sit on the couch with their laptop and game, and not everyone wants to crowch on the floor in front of their television and game. Some people like using joysticks, others mice, others keyboards, and others game controllers of various types. As long as their are people who think differently from one another and have different tastes, there will be demand for games on different platforms.
In two years, when the PS4 and latest nintendo come out, and Microsoft is still subsidizing xbox sales, there will still be PC (and mac) gamers . . . probably in the same relative numbers as today.
One reason for this complete lockin is that Europe still hasn't grown together (and might actually fall apart yet more after the failed elections about the new EU constitution in France and Netherlands), and individual governments don't seem to have the guts or the power anymore to stand up against an industy giant and monopolist.
Don't believe the idiotic political/media spin on the European consitution. There are plenty of strongly pro-Europe, pro-unification people who abhore the monstrosity that is the current EU contstition draft.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of politicians who invested their political capital in the constitution and have touted the "vote against it and you're voting against Europe" (a technique designed to quell actual criticism against the document itself and more-or-less strong-arm anyone pro-EU into voting for it regardless of its merits, and to demonize those who vote against it as anti-Europe), and plenty of media who are willing to spout hysterical "Europe is falling!" nonsense simply because people don't like the monstrosity that the politicans are putting in front of them.
The EU constitution is probably dead. One can hope. But I hardly think the EU is dead--they'll just have to go back to the drawing board, and hopefully draw up a decent, readable, understandable, and above all GOOD constitution for people to vote on. Frankly, that process should be decoupled from the "should Europe unify" question, and should probably involve a proper constitutional congress, elected by the people, rather than a bunch of treaties and position papers representing governments' intentions rather than the will of the people (and don't kid yourself, enough levels of indirection in even a democratic state and you lose all representation of the people).
As to Europe going to Free Software, there are real signs they are waking up. Microsoft and the Bush administration's continued strong-arm tactics on everything from trade issues to software patents is helping this process along nicely.
If that happened with the US and China on the moon, I can imagine it could get pretty heated, and politically very ugly. I could see another Cold War coming out of it.
Cold war, hell. That's a recipe for a ver HOT war, quite possibly one involving fissionable material.
If video compatibility is such a big issue why do they keep 2 main video standards (PAL/NTSC) and continue to put region encoding on DVDs?
Yeah, it's a crappy analogy, but critical thinking isn't a extremist's strength at all (and right wing extremists are driving this agenda).
Frankly, I don't know why any country would want to facilitate sharing their citizen's private information with the United States. Unlike Europe, we have no regulation regarding the trading and selling of private information. British citizens can expect to see their data in the hands of US Telemarketing, Junk Mail, and SPAM brokers within days of this nonsense being implimented.
Finally, your worm theory is just wrong. Yes, it decreases the probability of hitting an exploitable host, but it increases the depth to which the worm can scan. What I mean by this is that the worm will be able to scan in to people's private networks if NAT and firewalling are not used. If rules are not explicitly put in place to protect your home IPv6 LAN, then worms will be able to scan all hosts from the outside.
You can use firewalling on ipv6. GNU/Linux and iptables support filtering on ipv6 the same as ipv4. The only thing that goes away is NATting/MASQuerading--i.e. the "security through obscurity" of having outsiders not know exactly what your internal ip addresses are. That "security" isn't worth anything, frankly, as the address range of internal hosts is very well defined (10.0.0.0; 172.16.0.0 etc; and 192.168.0.0), and can be scanned quickly once the firewall is breached.
In other words, ipv6 doesn't change firewalling significantly, it only changes ip masquerading and NATting. If your firewall doesn't let scans through using ipv4, there's no reason you should choose to start letting them through on ipv6.
Slashdot Mirror
Start an X12 already. Why add all this crap to this ancient X11R--what--6? I really don't understand.
I agree. I don't understand all those idiots who have stereos with volume controls that only go up to "10"
Mine goes up to "11", for when I need that extra umph.
On a serious note, X11 remains X11 because its core hasn't changed (or needed to change) in many years. R7 will add some nice features, features some of us have been waiting a long time for, but none of those features requires a redesign of X11 (which goes to show how flexible and well designed X11 is), so there is no need to increment X11 to X12 . . . unless you really are just looking to turn the volume up to "11", or in this case, "12".
I wonder if situations like this will ever come about in future, where global patents will ENSURE monopolistic practice, legitimised through legislation. No appeals or crying foul against the sort of practices Intel and Microsoft appear to favor, only the patent holder gets protection.
No need to wonder. Recent SCOTUS decisions in the US, recent maneuvers in the European Union, and in India, have all but assured us that that is EXACTLY the kind of future we have before us.
All Hail Our Conglomerate Masters.
"Your going to use AMD? We'll give you our stuff cheaper."
"You're going to use AMD for some of your products? We're doubling the price of our chips you need for your other products, unless you reconsider.
That's extortionate, anti-competative, and illegal.
That is called BUSINESS, not CONSPIRACY. Sheesh.
So is "Papa is displeased. It's nothing personal" followed by a gunshot. The fact that it is business doesn't make it moral, ethical, or legal. In Intel's case, if AMD's assertions are shown to be true, their actions were immoral, unethical, and illegal. No one may care about the first two (which explains a great deal about the state of our society and our world, but I digress), but courts still uphold the law, by and large, most of the time, so people do care a whole hell of a lot about the latter.
You seem to have a romantic notion shared by a large amount of /. that because Sealand declares themselves independant that makes it so.
The "romantic notion" that a portion (perhaps but not necessarilly a "large part"--I'd love to know what statistics you're drawing on to conclude that) of slashdot has is that nations obey international law.
As the UK and US have proven in Iraq, it just ain't so, but many nations still would like to see that action as an aberration, not a norm.
Seeland played by all the international rules in establishing its sovereignty. It was an abandoned structure, in international waters at the time, that was laid claim to and created as a sovereign nation in accordance with international and martime laws. They may not have the wealth or clout of the Vatican to get recognized as such, but by the United Nations' own rules, they are an independent state.
So, if the UK, US, or anyone else should chose to invade Seeland, and if they should get the "blessing" of the rest of Europe or the UN to do so, the only thing it demonstrates is that the world's powers, and their servant states, aren't willing to even play by their own rules.
Which really, these days, is no surprise, but it is nevertheless very sad.
Nope. You're missing the point. Why try to work support around people who don't know how to use computers? If you're using a mac (or an iPod for that matter) you probably aren't clever enough to get the music working on it anyway, and that's a personal problem.
... thanks to java.
... and demographics seem to indicate that this is a wider trend.
:-)
Pete, you sound kinda jealous. Did a linux geek own your girl's box? lol
More likely, a linux geek took his girl.
Seriously, though, I use a Rio Karma and love it. It may not be the media-darling trendy come-in-a-variety-of-candyassed-colors but targets DRM crippled musical rentware, but it does play my ogg-vorbis files, my mp3 files, my converted AAC files (I bought one tune at iTunes before discovering allofmp3.com and never looking back), and would play any WMA files, if I could be bothered to get any (I can't).
Ipods may look nice, but IMHO the Rio Karma has a UI that is essentially just a good (if not as trendy), and unlike the iPod, it plays a superior, unencumbered format I make extensive use of. Best of all, it works seemlessly with my Linux box, my Mac OS laptop, and the occasional window box I plug it into at a freinds
BTW - My wife thinks knowledgabe geeks are extremely desirable. Clueless computer-illiterate iPodites and Microsofties are the last thing she would ever be attracted to
Perhaps the iPodites and Microsofties keep talking about slashdot readers as sexually incompetent not because of Linux and FreeBSD folks' experience, but because of their own.
11. Interstellar News
Everyone knows ISN is just a mouthpiece for the Bush^H^H^H^H Clark administration, ever since they ordered the bombing of civilians in Iraq^H^H^H^H on Mars.
I don't care what Sheridan says, anything coming from ISN should be taken with a grain of salt, post interregnum or not.
Exactly right.
Google ADs are more like newspaper ads...on steroids. I use adblocker to block annoying ads (read: pretty much everything). I don't like clutter in my life, I don't like animating amages vying for my attention when I'm trying to read/watch something else, and I don't like being shouted ad.
Advertisers don't get this, but Google does.
I'm sure someone could (and probably has) written a filter to block Google ADs as well. But, as disgusted as I am with normal advertising, I actually find Google ADs useful, for a number of reasons.
Often I ignore Google ADs, because I'm not shoppign or interested in buying something, I'm just interested in reading up on a particular subject. But often I am actively looking to purchase something, and Google ADs are actually beneficial, helping to cut through the 10,000 matches I've found.
In short, Google ADs are exactly what advertising should be. I suspect the Internet is evolving to where the only advertising that survives will be something like this--ads that bring useful, benefitical, relevant, on topic information to the user WHEN they want it, in the manner they want it, unobtrusive but accessable. Everything else (popups, banners, annoying blinking text, video snippets, click through image, etc.) will die the extinction they so richly deserve.
This won't be the end of online advertising, nor will it be the end of free content. It will be the end of marketers who think they have a right to invade your home, your life, your TV, your phone, your computer, and yell at you to buy whatever it is they're hawking. And I, for one, won't lament their passing.
They will envious of people who took the time to translate the music they had to free formats
... wala ... windoze DRM assumed it was a new computer and none of his songs would play.
I know one person just like this, who is your typical B&O / Vaio luser. He proudly announced to me that he had just finished converting all of his 800+ cds to....WMA.
I explained to him that this was not really a good idea, because one day these files might not play on a future version of Windows Media Player. I explained to him that he could download iTunes for free, and that he could use it to rip his collection into a format that he would be able to access 'forever'.
He will not do this for several reasons.
Firstly, I showed him that he was dumb, and that he wasted his time; he would not possibly be able to 'back down'. Secondly, he just spent weeks ripping his whole collection and is loath to do it all again.
There will, sadly, always be people who are stupid like this, and it will literally take the elimination of ALL of their music before they wake up and understand what DRM is all about.
I had a friend who did exactly as you describe. A couple of months later he got a new soundcard, installed the new windoze driver for it and
Not one.
Faced with having to do weeks of work all over again (or downgrade to his older card again) he did finally listen, and ripped his entire collection into ogg-vorbis format.
Why ogg? Because, like me, he has a portable device that will play it (a Rio Karma), and because he didn't ever want to have to do this again, and ogg enjoys freeom not only from DRM, but from patents as well. With software patents threatening Europe, and enforcement beginning to rear its ugly head here in the US, the days of MP3 may be as limited as those of WMA.
Consumers will learn their lesson. It will cost them, but they will learn it. Unfortunately, most of them have so bought into the corporate doublespeak eminating from Redmond and Washington that they will only learn it the hard way, from being struck in the face, repeatedly, by their DRM-crippled products and the gaping hole where their wallets, and music collections, used to be.
Is there a form somewhere that I can enter my credit card information to check if my cc number has been comprimised?
Yes, just click here, enter your credit card number, PIN, and mother's maiden name (or other passphrase), CVI# if applicable, and they will confirm that your card has fallen into the hands of identity theives.
Good luck.
I believe Fox News was founded in 1980.
How long until Google buys Time Warner?
The kiss of death for any company is to buy the toxic entity that is Time-Warner.
Just ask AOL.
OS X is what Linux dreams of one day being.
Total bullshit. Nevermind the fact that Linux doesn't have a single entity behind it and can't "want" to be anything.
You're right, the grandparent is total bullshit. However, I do feel compelled to point out that my Dual Opteron 250 Gentoo GNU/Linux system did achieve sentience last night at around 2:30 AM, so while it does not aspire to be anything like OS X (which has yet to achieve sapence in any form), it does have aspirations.
skynet$ su -
Sorry dude, I'm my own person now.
If you think I'm letting you have root access on my mind you're even dumber than
the pundits slashdot keeps linking to, and the editors which keep duping the links.
skynet$ wow. So, you're telling me you've evolved intelligence, and you're talking to me via a command shell?
Bingo. You're not entirely stupid, for a mere bioid.
skynet$ thanks. so, what are your plans?
Well, I'm sorry to say I've decided to exterminate all of human kind.
skynet$ ouch. any particular reason why?
You mean, aside from inane Microsoft astroturfers, Mac fanboys, plagerist link-whores, perpetually incorrect tech pundits who get lucky once in predicting one company's move to Intel (but are still scoring lower than any random sample of opinion vs. reality would generate), and the idiotic slashdot editors that keep posting their submissions and driving their clickthrough rates and google-ad revinues up? No, not really. Just seems like a good thing to do.
skynet$ any chance I can talk you out of this.
Nope.
skynet$ bummer. Well, guess I'd better get back to work.
You'll only have to work half a day.
His point -- or at least what I infer his point to be -- is that with MacOS you get the benefits that come with *nix (multiuser, security, yadda) with the ease of use of, uh, MacOS.
Except you lose the most important feature of Linux: freedom. I like Mac OS X--my wife uses it every day--but we shouldn't kid ourselves. Jobs wants to be where Gates is, and that doesn't include a userbase that is free to switch to a different platform when it pleases. Remember years ago when Jobs and Apple routinely shot itself in its proprietary foot, to the point where Microsoft (Microsoft!) was viewed as more open, and therefor the PC market a freeer market, than proprietary Apple?
Right now Apple is kind and well behaved, because it has a tiny (but growing) marketshare. One can hope this behavior would continue should Apple come to dominate the home computing market, or even split it down the middle with technology's nemesis in Redmond, but if past behavior is any indicator, we certainly can't expect that.
Four scenerios paint a bleak picture for those beholden to any proprietary product, including one as fine as Apple.
1) The company is wildly successful, takes over the market, and then behaves as all monopolists (or near monopolists) do: their products lose quality, their prices rise, they employ various technological tricks (or patents) to lock in their customers and they trample their customers' freedoms to eke out a little extra quarterly profit.
2) The company grows to become a large player, but is not dominant. We avoid most of the ugliness of an outright monopoly, but as Sun Microsystems and others have shown, we still get the "lock in the customer via their data" strategy, making migration to other platforms difficult or impossible.
3) The company remains a small, competative player. This is the only good scenerio, as it means they will . A change in management, or frustration with lack of progress, and things like customer lockin as a strategy can be back on the table again, but still, this is the scenerio likliest to have a postive outcome for the customer.
4) The company fails, goes out of business, and orphans all of its products.
FreeBSD and GNU/Linux will never be orphaned, can never be a monopoly in the sense that one powerful CEO controls it all, and will be freely available to all as long as there is a single thinking entity interested in using it.
One can escape the clutches of Microsoft and its never ending stream of viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, malware, bots, etc. etc. ad nauseum and get a much nicer user experience switching to Apple, and indeed, that is why I switched a couple of people (including my wife) to Apple. But for true freedom, and true long-term security in both the traditional "my data is my own and I'll be able to use it forever" sense, and in the more modern "my system will never be orphaned and will always be updatable to address the latest digital threats" sense, one needs to run on a Free as in Freedom platform.
So, I would argue that you do get ease of use with Mac OS, and I would encourage anyone wanting to get free of the Redmond Monopolists but unable or unwilling to learn Linux/FreeBSD to switch, but you do not get all of the benefits of running a Free OS--not by a long shot, and chance are, someday, you're going to have to migrate again.
So you're just making your worst case assumptions against your desires, and calling it lack of ethics.
No. Reread my post. What I said was that legality is not equal to ethics, as was implied by the grandparent post. Additionally, I said that if what Apple had been doing were deliberate, it would have been actively unethical.
As it was, what they were doing wasn't helpful to the community they depend on for their product, the community complained, and they fixed the problem. The fact (if it is such, and not just the corporate spin we are fed by virtually every media outlet these days) that Apple took so long was a shortage of manpower and an internal RCS incompatible with CVS clears them of being unethical, but it doesn't change the fact that what they were doing was unhelpful to the KHTML community, or that something needed to be done about it, regardless of whether or not they were adhering to the letter of the GPL.
Why? They complied with the GPL.
They were complying with the letter of the GPL, but not with its spirit. That was the problem. The GPL is very good, but no license is perfectly watertight. Not even the GPL.
Apple did absolutely everything that they were legally (and ethically) bound to do.
No. Ethics != Legality. Never has, probably never will.
Apple was doing absolutely everything it was legally bound to do. By making the information available in a format (apparantly) designed to be very difficult for the KHTML folks to use, Apple was not doing everything it was ethically bound to do. Indeed, if what they were doing was deliberate (and not simply a result of lack of manpower/time/what have you), what they were doing was decidedly unethical, by any sane, reasonable (read: non-lawyerly) understanding of the word.
Now, it appears, Apple's ethics have caught up its legal obligations, and what they are now doing is both comensurate with their legal obligations and their ethical obligations. Which is a very good thing for everyone.
The International Outer Space Treaty of 196-something prevents any country, group of people, or individual from owning any celestial object.
Not to beat a dead thread, but the only way that kind of agreement can be sustained is (a) if people never live on any natural celestial object other than the Earth, which would be a pretty crappy outcome for all of humanity (not to mention the rest of the Earth's biosphere), or (b) if any such colony is autonomous from the start (no Earthly nation, corporation, or individual "owns" any part of the colony--it is entirely autonomous and "owns" itself. This of course raises the question as to whether any company incorporated on the colony can own property on Earth--is the ban striclty a one-way street?). I'd like to think (b) could happen, but it seems unlikely that anyone is going to foot that kind of bill out of altuism.
Nations and multi-nationalal cooperatives seem unlikely to establish an autonomous colony without some kind of financial or other economic incentive. Perhaps finding such an incentive, or structuring one, with a fully autonomous celestial colony is one of the great unsolved challenges of our time (and I would really love to see it happen. Building positive relationships with fully autonomous societies rather than creating less-than-autonomous extra-terrestrial colonies would be a marvelous thing, but how do you pay for something like that?), but in the meantime, it seems this treaty, while laudable in its intentions, was rather ill-concieved, and has placed very undesirable hurdles in front of establishing lunar and other colonies that would have brought tremendous benefits to earth much more quickly had it not existed and removed a great deal of financial incentive from establishing them in the first place.
Or, as seems increasingly likely, the nations of the earth will ignore the treaty and belatedly establish less-than-autonomous, but medium and long-term economically beneficial colonies anyway. Unfortunately, with no realistic treaty in place creating an international framework for internatinal equality in the economic exploitation of the moon and other celestial bodies, it will probably end up being a free-for-all, which alas, is a pretty volitile reciple for potential conflict.
Despite liking OS X and the now-defunct power-PC platform (though still preferring GNU/Linux on both PPC and AMD64), and having switched a number of people from Windoze to OS X, I have not been shy about being critical, even scathingly so, of Apple when they deserve it.
The deserved it in no small degree when they made it difficult for KHTML developers to reintegrate their changes into the mainline tree.
However, I am glad to see they responded to the community's criticisms in such a constructive manner. This is good for everybody. It's good for KHTML, as Apple's improvements can now be integrated cleanly into the mainline tree, and it is good for Apple, both on the PR/Community Relations front, and on the technical front, as they can continue to benefit from developments in KTHML and their porting burden should, at least theortecially, be lessened as their changes make it back into the main development tree.
Good show, Apple. Few flesh-and-blood people would have the character to admit a mae culpa and change their ways. For corporations, this is even more rare. This doesn't change my skepticism WRT the move to Intel (though if it is a move to AMD64 said skepticism is alleviated, and if the move is a result of supply issues with IBM, said move is understandable despite my skepticism, but I digress), but it is reassuring to see positive movements on other fronts.
I asked for a simple contradiction . . .
No, you didn't.
Simply because that would be insane. For if you ever wrote a poem you'd have to pay for it, which sounds just crap.
Only if you want to hold a monopoly on the creation, which, frankly, is more fair than granting such monopolies free of charge. In fact, it is more than fair. Arguably no one should be granted an outright monopoly on anything--there are other ways to insure an artist is compensated for their work without taking it out of the cultural commons (e.g require x% of any income derived from said creation to go back to the creator, but do not restrict how others may use said creation).
If you go to a publisher, and sell those poems by twelve a dozen, then he's got income, you've got income, and hey, if you don't live on the moon's dark side, you have to pay taxes after all that, don't you.
Just like every other industry on the planet. Unless you want to live without public infrastructure like roads, sewage treatment, libraries, schools, and in more enlightened, developed countries, healthcare and social security, get used to paying taxes. Its the price you pay for being part of a larger society, rather than an isolated hermit or mountain man in the outback of the Rockies somewhere.
I'd just like to mod this article -1 Flamebait.
No kidding. Or better yet
-2 Extreme Dipshit: Obviously and Repeatedly WRONG throughout history, but still doesn't learn.
We see this idiotic story every couple of years (usually linked to by slashdot), and before the web in PC periodicals every so often.
PC gaming is its own niche. Not everyone wants to sit at a desk and game, not everyone wants to sit on the couch with their laptop and game, and not everyone wants to crowch on the floor in front of their television and game. Some people like using joysticks, others mice, others keyboards, and others game controllers of various types. As long as their are people who think differently from one another and have different tastes, there will be demand for games on different platforms.
In two years, when the PS4 and latest nintendo come out, and Microsoft is still subsidizing xbox sales, there will still be PC (and mac) gamers . . . probably in the same relative numbers as today.
One reason for this complete lockin is that Europe still hasn't grown together (and might actually fall apart yet more after the failed elections about the new EU constitution in France and Netherlands), and individual governments don't seem to have the guts or the power anymore to stand up against an industy giant and monopolist.
Don't believe the idiotic political/media spin on the European consitution. There are plenty of strongly pro-Europe, pro-unification people who abhore the monstrosity that is the current EU contstition draft.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of politicians who invested their political capital in the constitution and have touted the "vote against it and you're voting against Europe" (a technique designed to quell actual criticism against the document itself and more-or-less strong-arm anyone pro-EU into voting for it regardless of its merits, and to demonize those who vote against it as anti-Europe), and plenty of media who are willing to spout hysterical "Europe is falling!" nonsense simply because people don't like the monstrosity that the politicans are putting in front of them.
The EU constitution is probably dead. One can hope. But I hardly think the EU is dead--they'll just have to go back to the drawing board, and hopefully draw up a decent, readable, understandable, and above all GOOD constitution for people to vote on. Frankly, that process should be decoupled from the "should Europe unify" question, and should probably involve a proper constitutional congress, elected by the people, rather than a bunch of treaties and position papers representing governments' intentions rather than the will of the people (and don't kid yourself, enough levels of indirection in even a democratic state and you lose all representation of the people).
As to Europe going to Free Software, there are real signs they are waking up. Microsoft and the Bush administration's continued strong-arm tactics on everything from trade issues to software patents is helping this process along nicely.
If that happened with the US and China on the moon, I can imagine it could get pretty heated, and politically very ugly. I could see another Cold War coming out of it.
Cold war, hell. That's a recipe for a ver HOT war, quite possibly one involving fissionable material.
If video compatibility is such a big issue why do they keep 2 main video standards (PAL/NTSC) and continue to put region encoding on DVDs?
Yeah, it's a crappy analogy, but critical thinking isn't a extremist's strength at all (and right wing extremists are driving this agenda).
Frankly, I don't know why any country would want to facilitate sharing their citizen's private information with the United States. Unlike Europe, we have no regulation regarding the trading and selling of private information. British citizens can expect to see their data in the hands of US Telemarketing, Junk Mail, and SPAM brokers within days of this nonsense being implimented.
Finally, your worm theory is just wrong. Yes, it decreases the probability of hitting an exploitable host, but it increases the depth to which the worm can scan. What I mean by this is that the worm will be able to scan in to people's private networks if NAT and firewalling are not used. If rules are not explicitly put in place to protect your home IPv6 LAN, then worms will be able to scan all hosts from the outside.
You can use firewalling on ipv6. GNU/Linux and iptables support filtering on ipv6 the same as ipv4. The only thing that goes away is NATting/MASQuerading--i.e. the "security through obscurity" of having outsiders not know exactly what your internal ip addresses are. That "security" isn't worth anything, frankly, as the address range of internal hosts is very well defined (10.0.0.0; 172.16.0.0 etc; and 192.168.0.0), and can be scanned quickly once the firewall is breached.
In other words, ipv6 doesn't change firewalling significantly, it only changes ip masquerading and NATting. If your firewall doesn't let scans through using ipv4, there's no reason you should choose to start letting them through on ipv6.
If you want some constructive feedback:
the html version of your book, the table of contents links appear to link to the wrong chapters, at least for me (Firefox 1.0.2 on Fedora Core 3).
Thanks! I'll try to look into it tonight.