During their private meeting with Queen Elizabeth II, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama gave the monarch a personalized iPod with video footage of her 2007 visit to Washington and Virginia and preloaded with 40 show tunes, in blatant violation of copyright law.
The 9000-word iTunes or Amazon MP3 contracts establish licensing, not ownership, of the file, for personal, not commercial or diplomatic use. Furthermore, should the Queen connect her new iPod to a computer, further copies will be made, in direct contravention of British law.
"It's okay!" said Mr Obama. "As Nixon said, 'if the President does it that means it's not illegal.' And you can't sue the Queen anyway. So we're sweet with ACTA. Even if you aren't."
"One is delighted with one's gift," said Her Majesty. "It helps block that dreadful Italian fellow. Our grandchildren have also assisted us in 'downloading' our Coronation from 'The Pirate Bay.' What will they think of next!"
Songs include "Pass the Duchy", "We Are The Champions", "Public Image" and, of course, "Black President," which Michelle and Elizabeth "cut a rug" to arm in arm.
"I know I got them RIAA bozos in the house," said Mr Obama. "Joe's pals. But one word from me and her Royal Highness here and they'll be less popular than bankers. Word."
I'm honestly surprised they haven't quietly sponsored a porn site to offer free porn but only if you install Silverlight. It's the only way they'll get an installation base.
Microsoft today announced the release of version 2.0 of its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.
"We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Committee, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My options are underwater, my resume's a car crash, Google won't call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man. The walking dead."
Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.
"But it's got DRM!" cried Guthrie. "Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back! We'll put porn on it! Free porn!"
Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.
In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie's own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.
After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future, and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a 10-Q with the Securities Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil(tm) as a corporate policy.
"Fuck it," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!Ã
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole."
Sergey Brin of Google said, "Of course, we're still not evil. You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my 'spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."
Incorrect - if it runs in Wine, it'll run in FreeBSD (a supported platform).
(There's a lot of WoW players who run it in Wine on Ubuntu so their b0xx0r won't get h@xx0r3d if they piss off the wrong person. I find the rationale questionable, but that's the reason they give.)
You don't need to "port" stuff "with" Wine - you just run it in Wine.
Wine is ready for the enterprise. I say this because we use it ourselves (media content production chain requiring a particular piece of proprietary software - rather than buy two Windows boxes, we just run that bit of the chain in Wine under CentOS).
Wine is particularly good for running those odd little apps your whole business just happens to utterly rely on and you can't even find the company that developed it any more, let alone try to get it ported or opened.
Not a sure-fire thing, but works more often than not, gets noticeably better every two weeks and is absolutely worth a spin.
Any real-world app that doesn't work properly in Wine needs a bug on Wine opened. The goal is to run all of them.
Can't keep up their quarterly numbers on XP, that's for sure. They themselves blamed netbooks for their last failure to make their numbers. There's not so much profit to be made on XP at $0-$5 a copy.
And in any case, it isn't just that Windows is more popular - it really is more insecure than Unix by design. Windows is a skanky ho', going out in the bad part of town drunk and stoned with no pants on and saying "what could possibly go wrong?"
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced that the Australian government will build a new $43 billion national broadband network, connecting 90% of homes to 100-megabit fibre internet. "We believe that fast broadband is absolutely essential for our nation's future", he said.
"Telstra has raised issues with the amount of bandwidth usage this will produce, but our Great Firewall of Australia Internet filtering project should keep usage down to reasonable levels at near-dialup speeds."
The Great Firewall will reliably block all illegal material, child pornography, terrorism and unhappy thoughts on the network.
"Not only are the contents of the list illegal," said Senator Stephen Conroy, " but revealing the list is also illegal, as is linking to someone linking to someone purporting to reveal the list. So blocking Google Search is required. This will also help keep usage down to an acceptable level."
Calling it, the "single largest infrastructure decision in Australia's
history," Mr Rudd said the project would employ up to 37,000 people a year scanning citizens' net access, reading their email and correcting spelling errors in their football forum posts.
A consultative process will occur to determine the regulatory framework for the network. "We're considering getting Senator Fielding to do it personally," said Senator Conroy, "since he's the dickhead who demanded the censorship in return for his vote. Hopefully it'll melt his brain. Bloody balance of power. At least Nick Xenophon's bloody sane."
Frankly I'm just fucking sick of dealing with people's fucked-up Winders boxes. "NO. You get UBUNTU. Because you won't FUCK IT UP." Kubuntu 8.04 with all the restricted extras is pretty much ideal - it's stable, it gets security updates, it's KDE 3 so it looks and works just like XP.
Viewers will have the opportunity "to see more of our finest creative advertising minds at work" under proposals put forward by Ofcom to deal with the drop in television advertising revenue.
The report notes: "The advertising industry is powerfully adept at producing thirty-second immaculately-constructed visual masterpieces, perfect for the modern on-the-go citizen. We also hope to bring long-form works to the viewer, which they presently must seek out themselves on home shopping channels. We feel this will alleviate the monotony of shows such as The X Factor."
Broadcasters are currently restricted to showing an average of eight minutes an hour of advertising during peak times, amounting to a maximum of 40 minutes across the five-hour period. The new plan involves eight minutes an hour of programming, amounting to a maximum of 40 minutes across an evening.
"We want to ensure that viewers continue to benefit from a wide range of advertising-funded television services. We feel there is no prospect of this backfiring, as it's not as if there's any alternative to television," said the preliminary report, which is also available on YouTube and BitTorrent.
"Ofcom has taken on board our opinion that any suggestion of 'regulatory capture' by the bodies it is meant to set the rules for is piffle," said Channel Four. "But we understand these moves are controversial, and strongly suggest people call in with their opinion on our 0900 line, at only 95p a minute."
"Oh dear, what a pity, never mind," said a BBC spokesman, opening champagne.
A computer worm that spreads through low security networks, memory sticks, and PCs without the latest security updates is posing a growing threat to users blitheringly stupid enough to still think Windows is not ridiculously and unfixably insecure by design.
Despite many years' warnings that Microsoft regards security as a marketing problem and has only ever done the absolute minimum it can get away with, millions of users who click on any rubbish they see in the hope of pictures of female tennis stars having wardrobe malfunctions still fail to believe that taking Windows out on the Internet is like standing bent over in the street in downtown Gomorrah, naked, arse greased up and carrying a flashing neon sign saying "COME AND GET IT."
Microsoft cannot believe people have not applied the patch for the problem, just because they keep trying to use Windows Genuine Advantage to break legally-bought systems. "Don't they trust us?" asked marketing marketer Steve Ballmer.
Millions of smug Mac users and the four hundred smug Linux users pointed and laughed, having long given up trying to convince their Windows-using friends to see sense. "There's a reason the Unix system on Mac OS X is called Darwin," said appallingly smug Mac user Arty Phagge.
"It can't be stupid if everyone else runs it," said Windows user Joe Beleaguered, who had lost all his email, business files, MP3s and porn again. "Macs cost more than Windows PCs."
"Yes," said Phagge. "Yes, they do."
Ubuntu Linux developer Hiram Nerdboy frantically tried to get our attention about something or other, but we can't say we care.
Running Infoworld's web server
on
Even Dirtier IT Jobs
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Taken "offline for maintenance", i.e. applying a plunger to it after it got Slashdotted.
This is what they get for spreading a story over eight pages.
60% of UK consumers are willing to browse with an ad-blocker in return for free videos, music and other content, a survey has revealed.
"This willingness to pretend to view adverts in exchange for free content is good news for sites wanting to lie to advertisers, and is perhaps a pointer in the ongoing debate over whether advertising or subscription is the right revenue model," said Tudor Aw at KPMG.
40% said they would pretend to accept popups, popunders, interstitials, Phorm, floating windows, Flash videos that start playing sound automatically, eye-gouging animations and 2o7.net cookies in exchange for free music. 16% said they would pay to avoid ads. The rest would continue to use BitTorrent or Mozilla Firefox with AdBlock.
People were more willing to pay on mobile phones, unless they had a modern phone with which they could steal someone's WiFi connection.
Google, the world's largest online advertising agency, said it was looking into tastefully-interspersed direct content advertising and brand placement, and added that you should PUNCH THE MONKEY TO WIN £20,000!!! If you know what's good for you.
The Home Office said it was the UK Government's priority to "protect public safety and national security and, of course, our own jobs. The records are safeguarded by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to only be accessible in the direst of need, such as when your arsehole neighbour tells the council you're using their bin."
Social network users responded with outrage. "Liek, wtf?" said KT Myspce. "I put up pictures of me pissed on a public website run by a commercial company and the government looks at it? I'm defriending Jacqui Smith right now. Cow."
Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group said it was a "crazy directive" with potentially dangerous repercussions for citizens. "The mental health of the civil servants reviewing the data is in particular peril. What is seen cannot be unseen."
The initiative was welcomed by Internet users Bob Goatse, Boxxy Tubgirl and the Lemonparty Collective. "We look forward to introducing ourselves to even more wonderful Internet users," said two girls, handing reporters a cup. Spork shares were up 5% in early trading.
The problem is that Android is better described as a vague derivative of Linux than GNU/Linux as we know it. It was developed by an independent company with an attitude of "not invented here." Getting their, ah, innovations into the Linux mainline is an exercise in pain for the kernel devs, and if you want GNU/Linux as humans actually use it on it you need something similar to coLinux.
tl;dr summary: the most Linux-like thing about Android is buzzword compatibility.
You realise of course that this was the real-life GNUphone.
...
The Free Software Foundation (NASDAQ: RMS) has announced the Free Software alternative to the evil, DRM-infested, locked-down, defective-by-design iPhone: the GNUPhone.
The key technical innovation of the GNUPhone is that it is completely operated from the command line. "What could be more intuitive than a bash prompt?" said seventeen-year-old Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy. "The ultimate one-dimensional desktop! Just type dial voice +1-555-1212 -ntwk verizon -prot cdma2000 -ssh-version 2 -a -l -q -9 -b -k -K 14 -x and away you go! Simple and obvious!"
The phone will also serve as a versatile personal media player. "I can play any.au file or H.120 video with a single shell command! The iPod could never measure up to this powerful ease of use." Video is rendered into ASCII art with aalib. "If blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups were good enough for 1970s minicomputer operators, they're good enough for you. Respect your elders."
The KDE project will be bringing its next-generation KDE 4 desktop to the GNUPhone. "you can flip, twirl, dice, blend, fold, spindle and mutilate your terminal windows to your heart's content," said developer Aaron Seigo. "look at that cool effect! any complaint that basic functions don't actually work is ignorant of the intrinsic beauty of the plasma api and is just more fun spread by haters like stevie ray vaughan-nichols and novell corporation."
Actual successful voice calls are expected by 2011 to 2012. Regulatory approval is proving problematic in the corrupt, corporate-captured US environment. "The FCC said that if we dared switch on this, uh, 'piece of shit' in a built-up area in its present form, they'd break all our fingers with a fourteen-pound cluebat," said Nerdboy. "They're obviously shilling for Apple, Nokia and Microsoft."
The second version of the GNUPhone will run EMACS on the HURD kernel and be operated by writing eLisp macros on the fly. "It's the clearest, most elegant and natural operating environment anyone could conceive of," said Nerdboy. "Really, we're not out to destroy Apple; that will just be a completely unintentional side effect."
Yeah, people like that are why female geeks leave the industry. Developers who think they're brilliant communicators until they actually have to talk to a human.
...
The number of female IT professionals in the UK is falling, according to the British Computer Society, despite similar or superior academic scores and recruitment in the sector as a whole having risen in the same timeframe. The lack of flexibility offered by employers is blamed.
"It's a free market world," said Ubuntu Linux developer Hiram Nerdboy. "It's about competence and getting the job done. Working sixteen hours a day on a project you really love is par for the course. That we're all eighteen to twenty-five is from the accelerated Internet-based learning of the new generation, not exploitation of young workers who donâ(TM)t know any better."
Over a third of women in IT had complained of sexism up to sexual harassment at work. "Itâ(TM)s women who just don't have social skills," said Nerdboy. "They object to the guys freely choosing to all go down the strip club after work. Theyâ(TM)re just not team players."
Open source projects have worse figures than industry, with male to female ratios approaching fifty-to-one. Many women cite gross sexism on mailing lists and IRC. "In my experience, women just don't have a working sense of humour and canâ(TM)t take a joke. My girlfriend thought it was funny! Even leaving helpful comments on their blogs didnâ(TM)t work. 'Political correctness' is no exaggeration. Anyway, I met my girlfriend online!"
"...," said his girlfriend, RealDoll Ada.
"And it's not like you can get the applicants," added Nerdboy. "We can hardly get any girls to apply for a job here. They're obviously naturally not good enough geeks. It must be evolutionary. We need more pink computers."
Slashdot Mirror
During their private meeting with Queen Elizabeth II, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama gave the monarch a personalized iPod with video footage of her 2007 visit to Washington and Virginia and preloaded with 40 show tunes, in blatant violation of copyright law.
The 9000-word iTunes or Amazon MP3 contracts establish licensing, not ownership, of the file, for personal, not commercial or diplomatic use. Furthermore, should the Queen connect her new iPod to a computer, further copies will be made, in direct contravention of British law.
"It's okay!" said Mr Obama. "As Nixon said, 'if the President does it that means it's not illegal.' And you can't sue the Queen anyway. So we're sweet with ACTA. Even if you aren't."
"One is delighted with one's gift," said Her Majesty. "It helps block that dreadful Italian fellow. Our grandchildren have also assisted us in 'downloading' our Coronation from 'The Pirate Bay.' What will they think of next!"
Songs include "Pass the Duchy", "We Are The Champions", "Public Image" and, of course, "Black President," which Michelle and Elizabeth "cut a rug" to arm in arm.
"I know I got them RIAA bozos in the house," said Mr Obama. "Joe's pals. But one word from me and her Royal Highness here and they'll be less popular than bankers. Word."
I'd like to see them answer the question a commenter asked of where that graph comes from.
I'm honestly surprised they haven't quietly sponsored a porn site to offer free porn but only if you install Silverlight. It's the only way they'll get an installation base.
Microsoft today announced the release of version 2.0 of its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.
"We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Committee, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My options are underwater, my resume's a car crash, Google won't call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man. The walking dead."
Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.
"But it's got DRM!" cried Guthrie. "Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back! We'll put porn on it! Free porn!"
Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.
In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie's own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.
After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future, and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a 10-Q with the Securities Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil(tm) as a corporate policy.
"Fuck it," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!Ã
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole."
Sergey Brin of Google said, "Of course, we're still not evil. You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my 'spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."
OK :-) Pretty much no-one actually ports stuff with Wine (or, rather, Winelib). It's not so well maintained either.
Don't worry, it's all part of the joined-up thinking!
Incorrect - if it runs in Wine, it'll run in FreeBSD (a supported platform).
(There's a lot of WoW players who run it in Wine on Ubuntu so their b0xx0r won't get h@xx0r3d if they piss off the wrong person. I find the rationale questionable, but that's the reason they give.)
You don't need to "port" stuff "with" Wine - you just run it in Wine.
Wine is ready for the enterprise. I say this because we use it ourselves (media content production chain requiring a particular piece of proprietary software - rather than buy two Windows boxes, we just run that bit of the chain in Wine under CentOS).
Wine is particularly good for running those odd little apps your whole business just happens to utterly rely on and you can't even find the company that developed it any more, let alone try to get it ported or opened.
Not a sure-fire thing, but works more often than not, gets noticeably better every two weeks and is absolutely worth a spin.
Any real-world app that doesn't work properly in Wine needs a bug on Wine opened. The goal is to run all of them.
Can't keep up their quarterly numbers on XP, that's for sure. They themselves blamed netbooks for their last failure to make their numbers. There's not so much profit to be made on XP at $0-$5 a copy.
The trouble is not mainly that people didn't install an available patch. It's that no-one trusts Microsoft patches not to break things by accident or malice (I'm counting WGA as malice).
And in any case, it isn't just that Windows is more popular - it really is more insecure than Unix by design. Windows is a skanky ho', going out in the bad part of town drunk and stoned with no pants on and saying "what could possibly go wrong?"
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced that the Australian government will build a new $43 billion national broadband network, connecting 90% of homes to 100-megabit fibre internet. "We believe that fast broadband is absolutely essential for our nation's future", he said.
"Telstra has raised issues with the amount of bandwidth usage this will produce, but our Great Firewall of Australia Internet filtering project should keep usage down to reasonable levels at near-dialup speeds."
The Great Firewall will reliably block all illegal material, child pornography, terrorism and unhappy thoughts on the network.
"Not only are the contents of the list illegal," said Senator Stephen Conroy, " but revealing the list is also illegal, as is linking to someone linking to someone purporting to reveal the list. So blocking Google Search is required. This will also help keep usage down to an acceptable level."
Calling it, the "single largest infrastructure decision in Australia's history," Mr Rudd said the project would employ up to 37,000 people a year scanning citizens' net access, reading their email and correcting spelling errors in their football forum posts.
A consultative process will occur to determine the regulatory framework for the network. "We're considering getting Senator Fielding to do it personally," said Senator Conroy, "since he's the dickhead who demanded the censorship in return for his vote. Hopefully it'll melt his brain. Bloody balance of power. At least Nick Xenophon's bloody sane."
Frankly I'm just fucking sick of dealing with people's fucked-up Winders boxes. "NO. You get UBUNTU. Because you won't FUCK IT UP." Kubuntu 8.04 with all the restricted extras is pretty much ideal - it's stable, it gets security updates, it's KDE 3 so it looks and works just like XP.
http://mslinux.org/
Viewers will have the opportunity "to see more of our finest creative advertising minds at work" under proposals put forward by Ofcom to deal with the drop in television advertising revenue.
The report notes: "The advertising industry is powerfully adept at producing thirty-second immaculately-constructed visual masterpieces, perfect for the modern on-the-go citizen. We also hope to bring long-form works to the viewer, which they presently must seek out themselves on home shopping channels. We feel this will alleviate the monotony of shows such as The X Factor."
Broadcasters are currently restricted to showing an average of eight minutes an hour of advertising during peak times, amounting to a maximum of 40 minutes across the five-hour period. The new plan involves eight minutes an hour of programming, amounting to a maximum of 40 minutes across an evening.
"We want to ensure that viewers continue to benefit from a wide range of advertising-funded television services. We feel there is no prospect of this backfiring, as it's not as if there's any alternative to television," said the preliminary report, which is also available on YouTube and BitTorrent.
"Ofcom has taken on board our opinion that any suggestion of 'regulatory capture' by the bodies it is meant to set the rules for is piffle," said Channel Four. "But we understand these moves are controversial, and strongly suggest people call in with their opinion on our 0900 line, at only 95p a minute."
"Oh dear, what a pity, never mind," said a BBC spokesman, opening champagne.
A computer worm that spreads through low security networks, memory sticks, and PCs without the latest security updates is posing a growing threat to users blitheringly stupid enough to still think Windows is not ridiculously and unfixably insecure by design.
Despite many years' warnings that Microsoft regards security as a marketing problem and has only ever done the absolute minimum it can get away with, millions of users who click on any rubbish they see in the hope of pictures of female tennis stars having wardrobe malfunctions still fail to believe that taking Windows out on the Internet is like standing bent over in the street in downtown Gomorrah, naked, arse greased up and carrying a flashing neon sign saying "COME AND GET IT."
Microsoft cannot believe people have not applied the patch for the problem, just because they keep trying to use Windows Genuine Advantage to break legally-bought systems. "Don't they trust us?" asked marketing marketer Steve Ballmer.
Millions of smug Mac users and the four hundred smug Linux users pointed and laughed, having long given up trying to convince their Windows-using friends to see sense. "There's a reason the Unix system on Mac OS X is called Darwin," said appallingly smug Mac user Arty Phagge.
"It can't be stupid if everyone else runs it," said Windows user Joe Beleaguered, who had lost all his email, business files, MP3s and porn again. "Macs cost more than Windows PCs."
"Yes," said Phagge. "Yes, they do."
Ubuntu Linux developer Hiram Nerdboy frantically tried to get our attention about something or other, but we can't say we care.
Taken "offline for maintenance", i.e. applying a plunger to it after it got Slashdotted.
This is what they get for spreading a story over eight pages.
60% of UK consumers are willing to browse with an ad-blocker in return for free videos, music and other content, a survey has revealed.
"This willingness to pretend to view adverts in exchange for free content is good news for sites wanting to lie to advertisers, and is perhaps a pointer in the ongoing debate over whether advertising or subscription is the right revenue model," said Tudor Aw at KPMG.
40% said they would pretend to accept popups, popunders, interstitials, Phorm, floating windows, Flash videos that start playing sound automatically, eye-gouging animations and 2o7.net cookies in exchange for free music. 16% said they would pay to avoid ads. The rest would continue to use BitTorrent or Mozilla Firefox with AdBlock.
People were more willing to pay on mobile phones, unless they had a modern phone with which they could steal someone's WiFi connection.
Google, the world's largest online advertising agency, said it was looking into tastefully-interspersed direct content advertising and brand placement, and added that you should PUNCH THE MONKEY TO WIN £20,000!!! If you know what's good for you.
FOURTH CHANNEL, txtfiles.org, Sunday (NNN) — Logs of email, web usage and Internet phone calls will be stored by Internet service providers from Monday, per EU directive.
The Home Office said it was the UK Government's priority to "protect public safety and national security and, of course, our own jobs. The records are safeguarded by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to only be accessible in the direst of need, such as when your arsehole neighbour tells the council you're using their bin."
Social network users responded with outrage. "Liek, wtf?" said KT Myspce. "I put up pictures of me pissed on a public website run by a commercial company and the government looks at it? I'm defriending Jacqui Smith right now. Cow."
Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group said it was a "crazy directive" with potentially dangerous repercussions for citizens. "The mental health of the civil servants reviewing the data is in particular peril. What is seen cannot be unseen."
The initiative was welcomed by Internet users Bob Goatse, Boxxy Tubgirl and the Lemonparty Collective. "We look forward to introducing ourselves to even more wonderful Internet users," said two girls, handing reporters a cup. Spork shares were up 5% in early trading.
Yes. I'm desperately waiting for 3MX to get past interesting-alpha. Then I'll be off to Maplin.
http://littlelinuxlaptop.com/ is your friend if you get one of these things.
I seriously don't think Apple see Linux as competition. At all.
The problem is that Android is better described as a vague derivative of Linux than GNU/Linux as we know it. It was developed by an independent company with an attitude of "not invented here." Getting their, ah, innovations into the Linux mainline is an exercise in pain for the kernel devs, and if you want GNU/Linux as humans actually use it on it you need something similar to coLinux.
tl;dr summary: the most Linux-like thing about Android is buzzword compatibility.
You realise of course that this was the real-life GNUphone.
...
The Free Software Foundation (NASDAQ: RMS) has announced the Free Software alternative to the evil, DRM-infested, locked-down, defective-by-design iPhone: the GNUPhone.
The key technical innovation of the GNUPhone is that it is completely operated from the command line. "What could be more intuitive than a bash prompt?" said seventeen-year-old Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy. "The ultimate one-dimensional desktop! Just type dial voice +1-555-1212 -ntwk verizon -prot cdma2000 -ssh-version 2 -a -l -q -9 -b -k -K 14 -x and away you go! Simple and obvious!"
The phone will also serve as a versatile personal media player. "I can play any .au file or H.120 video with a single shell command! The iPod could never measure up to this powerful ease of use." Video is rendered into ASCII art with aalib. "If blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups were good enough for 1970s minicomputer operators, they're good enough for you. Respect your elders."
The KDE project will be bringing its next-generation KDE 4 desktop to the GNUPhone. "you can flip, twirl, dice, blend, fold, spindle and mutilate your terminal windows to your heart's content," said developer Aaron Seigo. "look at that cool effect! any complaint that basic functions don't actually work is ignorant of the intrinsic beauty of the plasma api and is just more fun spread by haters like stevie ray vaughan-nichols and novell corporation."
Actual successful voice calls are expected by 2011 to 2012. Regulatory approval is proving problematic in the corrupt, corporate-captured US environment. "The FCC said that if we dared switch on this, uh, 'piece of shit' in a built-up area in its present form, they'd break all our fingers with a fourteen-pound cluebat," said Nerdboy. "They're obviously shilling for Apple, Nokia and Microsoft."
The second version of the GNUPhone will run EMACS on the HURD kernel and be operated by writing eLisp macros on the fly. "It's the clearest, most elegant and natural operating environment anyone could conceive of," said Nerdboy. "Really, we're not out to destroy Apple; that will just be a completely unintentional side effect."
Yeah, people like that are why female geeks leave the industry. Developers who think they're brilliant communicators until they actually have to talk to a human.
...
The number of female IT professionals in the UK is falling, according to the British Computer Society, despite similar or superior academic scores and recruitment in the sector as a whole having risen in the same timeframe. The lack of flexibility offered by employers is blamed.
"It's a free market world," said Ubuntu Linux developer Hiram Nerdboy. "It's about competence and getting the job done. Working sixteen hours a day on a project you really love is par for the course. That we're all eighteen to twenty-five is from the accelerated Internet-based learning of the new generation, not exploitation of young workers who donâ(TM)t know any better."
Over a third of women in IT had complained of sexism up to sexual harassment at work. "Itâ(TM)s women who just don't have social skills," said Nerdboy. "They object to the guys freely choosing to all go down the strip club after work. Theyâ(TM)re just not team players."
Open source projects have worse figures than industry, with male to female ratios approaching fifty-to-one. Many women cite gross sexism on mailing lists and IRC. "In my experience, women just don't have a working sense of humour and canâ(TM)t take a joke. My girlfriend thought it was funny! Even leaving helpful comments on their blogs didnâ(TM)t work. 'Political correctness' is no exaggeration. Anyway, I met my girlfriend online!"
"...," said his girlfriend, RealDoll Ada.
"And it's not like you can get the applicants," added Nerdboy. "We can hardly get any girls to apply for a job here. They're obviously naturally not good enough geeks. It must be evolutionary. We need more pink computers."