Yes, I realize that. I feel my question still stands, though.
On another note: Offtopic?!?!?!?
What is wrong with you moderators? Did you even bother to read the fscking article?
Flamebait, sure, I actually expected a flamebait mod. Troll I could see, maybe. But Offtopic?!? Come on!!!
Re:Guardian Interview with Christopher Reeve
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 2
Our pledge states that we are a nation indivisible "under God" It is inseparable from the fabric of our nation
Not according to the Judicial Branch, which is exactly the point. You are certainly right that the beleifs of the majority affect government, and that's exactly why the concept of seperation of Church and State exists. In a free country it is essential that the government not espouse one particular religion over another.
BTW, the phrase "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and "In God we Trust" didn't show up on our currency until 1957 (with the exception of a few 2-cent pieces minted during the Civil War).
Let me also point out that what the Declaration of Independence says means precisely nothing in this debate. The Declaration of Independence is not law. The Constitution, however, is law -- the supreme law of the land, in fact -- and it has some very specific things to say about the seperation of Church and State. Particularly relevant is Article VI, which states "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
Truth is, it is impossible to separate Church and State because the rock that our moral code is built upon comes from God.
"general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . We need believing people." -- Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933
Contrast with: "As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion;..." --U.S. treaty with Tripoli, written under Washington, ratified under Adams, signed by Adams
After all, we outlawed murder on a moral basis and kidnapping, and sex offenses.
All of those things are outlawed for practical reasons. In each of those cases the rights of another are being violated by the perpetrator. The common phrase is "Your right to swing your fist ends at my face". There are a host of practical reason for these actions to be outlawed which have nothing to do with religion or morality. God's law is irrelevant, a realization of the benefits of an ordered, safe society are all that's required to justify such laws.
I'm in this boat with a Perl app I would like to migrate to a couple of Windows 2000 servers. It's a simple app that runs well on our Unix boxes and if it wasn't for the overhead of having to install perl and all of the required modules, it would be a no brainer.
If you're that worried about overhead, why the hell are you migrating to Windows 2000?
Drivers would seem to be the big hurdle. Once you have the data in the system the calculations are pretty simple. Heck, even I could write a program to do them (it would be CLI, though). Have you check with the manufacturer to see if they offer Linux drivers?
The idea is that the IT department should be able to pick whatever application best suits their needs based on features, price, etc, rather than having to use a particular app because it's the only one that supports a particular file format.
That seems like a pretty good idea to me, but perhaps you're too lazy and/or stubborn and/or religious to see the benefits of it?
the chance that Intel will give the hardware specs to open source communities is slim to none.
Intel has a pretty good working relationship with both SuSE and Red Hat, and has for a couple of years now. Intel has put a fair amount of money into both of those companies and worked closely with them to port Linux to IA-64. You may have noticed that there was Linux support for that architecture long before there was MS support for it, and a big part of that is because MS was in no particular hurry to provide any support.
The problem is not with Intel communicating with the open source community, but rather with MS owning the patents for booting to a DRM aware OS from DRM aware hardware (Paladium).
If someone wrote an open-source restrictions-management system, the decryption keys would no longer be obscured, since you could simply glean them from the source code.
Linux has encrypted passwords in/etc/passwd, Linux being open source has in no way made these less secure then they are on any other *nix system. Similarly, there are several other open source apps and projects dealing with decryption keys which don't seem to suffer any from being open source, such as openssl, openssh, gpg, etc.
My point is, obscurity is not security, and shouldn't be confused for such. Based on the success of the above projects, I see no reason why open source DRM should be an oxymoron.
She had to do a lot of borderline-sexploitation stuff when she was younger.
Speaking of which, have you seen "Mullhuland Falls"? Wow! I actually thought it was a good movie, too, but Jen Connolly in black lace lingerie made it fantastic for me:-)
And just to be totally OT, I found a picture of Jen Connolly where she looks exactly like a friend of mine, whom I sadly never managed to hook up with.
There is nothing about KDE that prevents KDE apps from running under GNOME, or vice versa, as long as all the dependencies are satisfied.
The whole thing is being done in KDE, hosted on KDE CVS, using KDE apps as the base, so I would say that, yes, everything would be built with KDE dependencies. So what? As I said above, that doesn't mean you have to use KDE, just that you have to have the necessary components and libs installed. I run several KDE apps under WindowMaker every day, no problem, so even if the project is heavily KDE dependent I would say it's still desktop-agnostic since you don't need to be using KDE to use any of the KDE apps.
As for OS-agnostic, I can't say. I know QT is available for Windows, but I have no idea what that means as far as running KDE apps on Windows. That's one area where a Mozilla-based solution could have a definate advantage. Mozilla runs everywhere. This particular project plans on using Outlook with an existing plug-in, though.
I think it's actually up to $5000, as that's what my dad's neighbor tried to sue for when my dad tore down an unstable structure that said neighbor built on my dad's property. I beieive my dad's response was something like "Oh, really! Lets talk about those trees of mine that you cut down last year...". Some people are just too dumb to live.
This comment certainly sheds doubt on your IT experience, or your experience in any other service-related field. The sad truth is that adults are that stupid.
I've personally seen 15-pin VGA cables jammed on to 9-pin serial connectors, and printer cables plugged in backwards. All it takes is a little determination and a creative application of force. How about the woman who couldn't figure out how to turn off her windshield wipers, so she held them down until the electric motor that drove them burned up?
Perhaps you should get a little experience yourself before you go calling other people liars.
That's often all it takes, just politely informing them that they are liable for a $500 fine for every unsolicited fax they send you. Most of the time a lawyer will not be needed. If you are in California any civil suit for under $5000 would go to small claims court, where lawyers aren't even allowed, and if one party doesn't show up they automatically lose. That's one of my Dad's favorite things to remind greedy corporations who try to screw him of (the most recent victim was Earthlink). He's probably the most effective person I know in such situations.
Notice that there are no lawyers involved in any of the above steps. The law is involved, however, which is why it's effective. And, if your fax-spammers refuse to stop you can make some easy money on the side, again with no lawyers involved (in CA, anyway).
I'm doing something similar with my mother-in-laws old computer, which is a Packard Bell with almost the same specs. I upgraded the RAM to 64M, since the graphical installs on most modern distros really want to have that much. Yeah you can get around that, but it can be a little painful. I recommend you do the same, as FPM/EDO prices are pretty low right now. Things should work without doing that, but it will likely make your life a little easier. Actually, my biggest roadblock was the broken CD-ROM drive, which would lock up any boot disk that tried to load drivers for it.
Also, 3GB is an infinite amount of space for what you are planning to do. My full SuSE 8.0 install on my desktop at home is barely over 3GB, and it's about as bloated as a Linux install can be, as I figured I'd start with everything and slowly par it down to what I want.
QNX would be almost lost on a drive that big. It's designed for embedded systems, and in that world a system like yours is quite luxurious. The QNX4 demo fits on a 1.44M floppy. I actually have several systems running QNX4 within spitting distance at the moment, and none of them have hardware significantly different from yours, and they are quite responsive (they'd better be, that's what real-time is all about after all). They're single-board "industrial" computers, all with Pentium 90s or 100s, embedded VGA, and anywhere from 32M to 128M RAM, depending on their specific purpose. With a full QNX install, plus all of my companies proprietary software, plus the usual cruft (saved log files and core dumps, system upgrade sources, etc) only one of them is managing to use up more than 500M of disk space. I haven't tried Neutrino yet, but I'd be surprised if it were much more demanding.
It's a little hard to find info about 3rd party apps for QNX, so I don't know what kind of word processing apps might be available, but hey, it'll run Quake3 and Unreal Tournament, and what more do you really want?;-P
The real bad news is that the Lexmark Z11 is not listed on their supported hardware page. There are a ton of Epsons and Cannons listed, though, so you may be able to swap with someone who has one of those. That could be an issue for Linux as well. Lexmark has put out Linux drivers for most of their newer printers, and I think the Z11 is new enough to be one of them, but they don't include the drivers on the install disk and they make them difficult to find on their website (unless you start at the Linux driver page, but only the printer setup wizard in YaST seems to know where that is).
Anyway, good luck. You shouldn't have too much difficulty, but I do recommend a RAM upgrade if you've got a few extra bucks.
According to my Dad chia seeds are an excellent energy food. I haven't verified this personally, but he was quite fond of them when he was working 10-12 hour days in construction.
Thomson does indeed own Philips, or at least enough of it to have control over what gets produced where.
I work for Thomson at Grass Valley Group on a product which was origionally developed by Alamar, which was bought by Philips, and which is now being moved to Grass Valley as Thomson consolidates its various video production divisions at Grass Valley. My trainer is a Feild Service tech who works for Philips.
You'll pardon me if I trust the evidence available to me at work every day over your speculation based on stock listings.
It is not free, it's bundled. You pay for it when you buy Windows. Using WMA is effectively no different, in your scenario, from using using mp3, except that Thomson, unlike MS, allows anyone to write a player for any OS. You're effectively saying "I just found out that mp3 is restricted, so I'm going to use another format that's even more restricted instead". That really doesn't make any sense, especially since Thomson has publicly stated that they have no intention of collecting royalties from free players.
Microsoft an encoder. Thomson allows you to build your own and they don't care as long as you don't charge money for it.
I would say that the danger of Thomson being bought up is pretty low, since they are the ones doing all the buying at the moment. In case you care, Thomson owns Philips and RCA, as well as several smaller companies, including Grass Valley Group, which is where I'm currently contracting. From the logos on the company store website Thomson is also affiliated with GE, although exactly what the relationship is I can't say. If you recall, Philips is the company that owns the Audio CD patent and says that copy-protected CDs can't be labeled as Audio CDs, so perhaps we shouldn't immediately jump to the conclusion that Thomson is an evil corporation.
That said, I think you've misread the article. Nowhere did it say that there are no royalties on mp3 decoders, quite the contrary; there have always been royalties on mp3 decoders, and Thompson has merely changed the wording of their licensing in such a way that made it more obvious. The licensing fees are exactly the same as they have always been.
Now, as long as Thomson's enforcement remains the same also, we're OK. Patent royalties can be selectively enforced, and I suspect that Thomson will continue to collect royalties from Hardware vendors and pretty much ignore software since that's the business model they're used to and it is serving them well.
It is always possible that Thomson will suddenly need a new revenue stream or someone high up will get greedy and decide they need to collect back royalties from all the Free mp3 developers, but I think those chances are pretty slim.
I, for one, am not concerned about this news affecting the future of mp3.
However, I think it's a bit preemptive to say that ogg will always be Free, unless of course you have read every patent pertaining to audio compression and are able to prove that none of those can possibly cover any aspect of ogg.
Reread the post. He's talking about copying DVDs, not playing them, which is exactly what DeCSS is supposed to prevent. Copying DVDs is equally difficult on either OS.
Don't do it! (Install Linux for them, I mean) Your support calls will dry up!
I installed a Linux fileserver at a company I used to work at, and when I was laid off we agreed that they would call on me if they ever had a problem with the server and we would "work something out". I haven't recieved a single call, and it's been over 6 months! When I run into my former coworkers at the store and such I ask them how the servers doing and they always say "Great, we haven't had a single problem".
If you depend on support calls to make your living, the last thing you want to do is install Linux!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I realize that. I feel my question still stands, though.
On another note: Offtopic?!?!?!?
What is wrong with you moderators? Did you even bother to read the fscking article?
Flamebait, sure, I actually expected a flamebait mod. Troll I could see, maybe. But Offtopic?!? Come on!!!
Our pledge states that we are a nation indivisible "under God" It is inseparable from the fabric of our nation
Not according to the Judicial Branch, which is exactly the point. You are certainly right that the beleifs of the majority affect government, and that's exactly why the concept of seperation of Church and State exists. In a free country it is essential that the government not espouse one particular religion over another.
BTW, the phrase "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and "In God we Trust" didn't show up on our currency until 1957 (with the exception of a few 2-cent pieces minted during the Civil War).
Let me also point out that what the Declaration of Independence says means precisely nothing in this debate. The Declaration of Independence is not law. The Constitution, however, is law -- the supreme law of the land, in fact -- and it has some very specific things to say about the seperation of Church and State. Particularly relevant is Article VI, which states "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
Truth is, it is impossible to separate Church and State because the rock that our moral code is built upon comes from God.
"general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . We need believing people."
-- Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933
Contrast with:
"As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion;..."
--U.S. treaty with Tripoli, written under Washington, ratified under Adams, signed by Adams
After all, we outlawed murder on a moral basis and kidnapping, and sex offenses.
All of those things are outlawed for practical reasons. In each of those cases the rights of another are being violated by the perpetrator. The common phrase is "Your right to swing your fist ends at my face". There are a host of practical reason for these actions to be outlawed which have nothing to do with religion or morality. God's law is irrelevant, a realization of the benefits of an ordered, safe society are all that's required to justify such laws.
Excellent idea!
He really is an amazing guy, and much more intelligent than I would have given him credit for all those years ago.
Of course, we may have to wait in line as it seems he's pretty busy these days...
Pierce said of the interview questions: "Those are not litmus tests."
But he's right! Litmus tests use paper strips, and the interview was clearly done over the phone!
I'm in this boat with a Perl app I would like to migrate to a couple of Windows 2000 servers. It's a simple app that runs well on our Unix boxes and if it wasn't for the overhead of having to install perl and all of the required modules, it would be a no brainer.
If you're that worried about overhead, why the hell are you migrating to Windows 2000?
Go to a real school!
Even my junior college physics department has photogates!
Drivers would seem to be the big hurdle. Once you have the data in the system the calculations are pretty simple. Heck, even I could write a program to do them (it would be CLI, though). Have you check with the manufacturer to see if they offer Linux drivers?
Wow! Did you totally miss the point, or what!
The idea is that the IT department should be able to pick whatever application best suits their needs based on features, price, etc, rather than having to use a particular app because it's the only one that supports a particular file format.
That seems like a pretty good idea to me, but perhaps you're too lazy and/or stubborn and/or religious to see the benefits of it?
the chance that Intel will give the hardware specs to open source communities is slim to none.
Intel has a pretty good working relationship with both SuSE and Red Hat, and has for a couple of years now. Intel has put a fair amount of money into both of those companies and worked closely with them to port Linux to IA-64. You may have noticed that there was Linux support for that architecture long before there was MS support for it, and a big part of that is because MS was in no particular hurry to provide any support.
The problem is not with Intel communicating with the open source community, but rather with MS owning the patents for booting to a DRM aware OS from DRM aware hardware (Paladium).
If someone wrote an open-source restrictions-management system, the decryption keys would no longer be obscured, since you could simply glean them from the source code.
/etc/passwd, Linux being open source has in no way made these less secure then they are on any other *nix system. Similarly, there are several other open source apps and projects dealing with decryption keys which don't seem to suffer any from being open source, such as openssl, openssh, gpg, etc.
Linux has encrypted passwords in
My point is, obscurity is not security, and shouldn't be confused for such. Based on the success of the above projects, I see no reason why open source DRM should be an oxymoron.
She had to do a lot of borderline-sexploitation stuff when she was younger.
:-)
Speaking of which, have you seen "Mullhuland Falls"? Wow! I actually thought it was a good movie, too, but Jen Connolly in black lace lingerie made it fantastic for me
And just to be totally OT, I found a picture of Jen Connolly where she looks exactly like a friend of mine, whom I sadly never managed to hook up with.
There is nothing about KDE that prevents KDE apps from running under GNOME, or vice versa, as long as all the dependencies are satisfied.
The whole thing is being done in KDE, hosted on KDE CVS, using KDE apps as the base, so I would say that, yes, everything would be built with KDE dependencies. So what? As I said above, that doesn't mean you have to use KDE, just that you have to have the necessary components and libs installed. I run several KDE apps under WindowMaker every day, no problem, so even if the project is heavily KDE dependent I would say it's still desktop-agnostic since you don't need to be using KDE to use any of the KDE apps.
As for OS-agnostic, I can't say. I know QT is available for Windows, but I have no idea what that means as far as running KDE apps on Windows. That's one area where a Mozilla-based solution could have a definate advantage. Mozilla runs everywhere. This particular project plans on using Outlook with an existing plug-in, though.
I think it's actually up to $5000, as that's what my dad's neighbor tried to sue for when my dad tore down an unstable structure that said neighbor built on my dad's property. I beieive my dad's response was something like "Oh, really! Lets talk about those trees of mine that you cut down last year...". Some people are just too dumb to live.
For one, no adult is that stupid,
This comment certainly sheds doubt on your IT experience, or your experience in any other service-related field. The sad truth is that adults are that stupid.
I've personally seen 15-pin VGA cables jammed on to 9-pin serial connectors, and printer cables plugged in backwards. All it takes is a little determination and a creative application of force. How about the woman who couldn't figure out how to turn off her windshield wipers, so she held them down until the electric motor that drove them burned up?
Perhaps you should get a little experience yourself before you go calling other people liars.
That's often all it takes, just politely informing them that they are liable for a $500 fine for every unsolicited fax they send you. Most of the time a lawyer will not be needed. If you are in California any civil suit for under $5000 would go to small claims court, where lawyers aren't even allowed, and if one party doesn't show up they automatically lose. That's one of my Dad's favorite things to remind greedy corporations who try to screw him of (the most recent victim was Earthlink). He's probably the most effective person I know in such situations.
Notice that there are no lawyers involved in any of the above steps. The law is involved, however, which is why it's effective. And, if your fax-spammers refuse to stop you can make some easy money on the side, again with no lawyers involved (in CA, anyway).
I'm doing something similar with my mother-in-laws old computer, which is a Packard Bell with almost the same specs. I upgraded the RAM to 64M, since the graphical installs on most modern distros really want to have that much. Yeah you can get around that, but it can be a little painful. I recommend you do the same, as FPM/EDO prices are pretty low right now. Things should work without doing that, but it will likely make your life a little easier. Actually, my biggest roadblock was the broken CD-ROM drive, which would lock up any boot disk that tried to load drivers for it.
;-P
Also, 3GB is an infinite amount of space for what you are planning to do. My full SuSE 8.0 install on my desktop at home is barely over 3GB, and it's about as bloated as a Linux install can be, as I figured I'd start with everything and slowly par it down to what I want.
QNX would be almost lost on a drive that big. It's designed for embedded systems, and in that world a system like yours is quite luxurious. The QNX4 demo fits on a 1.44M floppy. I actually have several systems running QNX4 within spitting distance at the moment, and none of them have hardware significantly different from yours, and they are quite responsive (they'd better be, that's what real-time is all about after all). They're single-board "industrial" computers, all with Pentium 90s or 100s, embedded VGA, and anywhere from 32M to 128M RAM, depending on their specific purpose. With a full QNX install, plus all of my companies proprietary software, plus the usual cruft (saved log files and core dumps, system upgrade sources, etc) only one of them is managing to use up more than 500M of disk space. I haven't tried Neutrino yet, but I'd be surprised if it were much more demanding.
It's a little hard to find info about 3rd party apps for QNX, so I don't know what kind of word processing apps might be available, but hey, it'll run Quake3 and Unreal Tournament, and what more do you really want?
The real bad news is that the Lexmark Z11 is not listed on their supported hardware page. There are a ton of Epsons and Cannons listed, though, so you may be able to swap with someone who has one of those. That could be an issue for Linux as well. Lexmark has put out Linux drivers for most of their newer printers, and I think the Z11 is new enough to be one of them, but they don't include the drivers on the install disk and they make them difficult to find on their website (unless you start at the Linux driver page, but only the printer setup wizard in YaST seems to know where that is).
Anyway, good luck. You shouldn't have too much difficulty, but I do recommend a RAM upgrade if you've got a few extra bucks.
According to my Dad chia seeds are an excellent energy food. I haven't verified this personally, but he was quite fond of them when he was working 10-12 hour days in construction.
Molds and mosses can do well, too, especially if the environment is moist. Buy yourself a couple of humidifiers and see what you get!
Thomson does indeed own Philips, or at least enough of it to have control over what gets produced where.
I work for Thomson at Grass Valley Group on a product which was origionally developed by Alamar, which was bought by Philips, and which is now being moved to Grass Valley as Thomson consolidates its various video production divisions at Grass Valley. My trainer is a Feild Service tech who works for Philips.
You'll pardon me if I trust the evidence available to me at work every day over your speculation based on stock listings.
Sorry, that should have said:
Microsoft provides an encoder. Thomson allows you to build your own and they don't care as long as you don't charge money for it.
I should really preview more...
It is not free, it's bundled. You pay for it when you buy Windows. Using WMA is effectively no different, in your scenario, from using using mp3, except that Thomson, unlike MS, allows anyone to write a player for any OS. You're effectively saying "I just found out that mp3 is restricted, so I'm going to use another format that's even more restricted instead". That really doesn't make any sense, especially since Thomson has publicly stated that they have no intention of collecting royalties from free players.
Microsoft an encoder. Thomson allows you to build your own and they don't care as long as you don't charge money for it.
I would say that the danger of Thomson being bought up is pretty low, since they are the ones doing all the buying at the moment. In case you care, Thomson owns Philips and RCA, as well as several smaller companies, including Grass Valley Group, which is where I'm currently contracting. From the logos on the company store website Thomson is also affiliated with GE, although exactly what the relationship is I can't say. If you recall, Philips is the company that owns the Audio CD patent and says that copy-protected CDs can't be labeled as Audio CDs, so perhaps we shouldn't immediately jump to the conclusion that Thomson is an evil corporation.
That said, I think you've misread the article. Nowhere did it say that there are no royalties on mp3 decoders, quite the contrary; there have always been royalties on mp3 decoders, and Thompson has merely changed the wording of their licensing in such a way that made it more obvious. The licensing fees are exactly the same as they have always been.
Now, as long as Thomson's enforcement remains the same also, we're OK. Patent royalties can be selectively enforced, and I suspect that Thomson will continue to collect royalties from Hardware vendors and pretty much ignore software since that's the business model they're used to and it is serving them well.
It is always possible that Thomson will suddenly need a new revenue stream or someone high up will get greedy and decide they need to collect back royalties from all the Free mp3 developers, but I think those chances are pretty slim.
I, for one, am not concerned about this news affecting the future of mp3.
However, I think it's a bit preemptive to say that ogg will always be Free, unless of course you have read every patent pertaining to audio compression and are able to prove that none of those can possibly cover any aspect of ogg.
Reread the post. He's talking about copying DVDs, not playing them, which is exactly what DeCSS is supposed to prevent. Copying DVDs is equally difficult on either OS.
Wrong approach. Put them on a maintenance contract instead, and collect the easy money.
Well, sure, I know that now.
Why didn't anyone warn me?
Don't do it! (Install Linux for them, I mean) Your support calls will dry up!
I installed a Linux fileserver at a company I used to work at, and when I was laid off we agreed that they would call on me if they ever had a problem with the server and we would "work something out". I haven't recieved a single call, and it's been over 6 months! When I run into my former coworkers at the store and such I ask them how the servers doing and they always say "Great, we haven't had a single problem".
If you depend on support calls to make your living, the last thing you want to do is install Linux!