A hilarious side effect of this law is that you can now block news reporters from filming you at all. Simply film a few minutes of footage of your cat, the traffic, or a blank wall. Purchase a portable video players, such as the Archos AV300. Walk around in public holding the video player in the air for all to see while looping your recording. You own the rights to the recording, but you have not granted the rights to operate recording gear to anyone in your proximity.
You have now made it illegal for anyone to film you. Interestingly, you may be able to carry this device into a bank, government office, etc., and require that they turn off their security cameras as well, lest they are in violation of the law.
According to my interpretation of this law, consider the Circuit City delima. As Circuit City sells televisions and their floor models are constantly playing movies for demonstration purposes, the following things are now illegal inside the store:
* As a customer, taking a video recording of your friends with your own cell phone.
* As a customer, trying out the video recording feature of a cell phone that you are interested in purchasing.
* As a customer, trying out the video recording capabilities of a camcorder or other dv device before purchasing.
* As a salesperson, demonstrating the video capabilities of cell phones or camcorders.
* As the store itself, recording images from their own security cameras.
Because of this law, Circuit City would have to disallow their customers from trying out in the store the very products they sell, stop their salespeople from demostrating their own products, and disable their own security cameras.
Only in America, folks, would we let corporations making such a laughing stock of the public.
Linux users, on average, are probably more educated than Windows users. (To avoid a flame war, note that I said "on average". Everybody and their grandmother uses Windows, thus driving the average level of education down. Whereas Linux users tend to pick it up either in high-tech jobs, implying advanced education, or in the secondary schools themselves. Although the delta may be smaller for the MMORPG market.)
More educated people tend to make more money than less educated people.
People that make more money have more money to spend on things like game subscriptions.
Hence the slightly higher subscription rate among Linux users.
Just one theory... Though my personal bet is that the driving factor is the limited competition for online games that support Linux.
In fact, we're witnessing a defining moment in history that is indeed changing, and will continue to change, corporate markets forever.
Never before has this been possible. An individual, at virtually zero cost, can now express their opinion about the acts of a corporation or their products. Prior to the explosion of the internet, the only "people" with a voice loud enough to be heard by the buying public were those that had enough financial backing to fund such a publication. That included a very short list of a) corporations, such as the one that is selling the product in question, and b) large media organizations, which are also corporations. The problem is that "a" is clearly and understandably biased -- as their only responsibility is to profit off of their own product. Unfortunately, so is "b", as the very economic viability of traditional media is co-dependent on the health of a commercial marketplace, and the advertizing dollars that support it, thus implying an inherent and unavoidable conflict of interest. While there remained the possibility that a subscriber-based review publication could remain bias-free, that only acts in the interest of those that are able and willing to pay for the unbiased report -- i.e., a small enough minority that it does not protect the general population.
But here we have an environment in which a very minimially funded voice (i.e., a private individual) can easily make themselves heard to those who want to listen. Thus the tens of millions of advertising dollars invested by the product manufacturer can be trumped by pennies invested by the masses.
In the end, what does this mean? It means that the corporation will be forced to adjust to a new market. Period. Sure, there will be court battles regarding free speach vs. trademarks and ip claims, etc., etc. But ultimately, the corporations that adjust fastest, rather than those fighting the customer, will sell more products and thus grow healthier and stronger than those that do not adjust. And those healthier corporations will be marketing products that are driven directly by consumer desires. This is a good thing for the consumer, is it not? Can you think of a counterexample, where the ultimate needs of the masses were better known by the corporation than the masses themselves?
Note that I am not saying that there are not situations in which small, informed bodies can actually make better decisions for the majority than the majority itself. However, should those decisions not be relegated to a democratically elected body -- i.e., government?
Of course, the trend of free, instantanious information dissemination across a broad spectrum of the internet tends to democracize corporations over time, thus further blurring the lines between the corporation and the government itself. A parallel, of course, being drawn with the advent of inexpensive publishing via the printing presses that drove the governments themselves toward democracy.
And, like the risk of the democracy, the needs of the few can be lost in the desires of the many. So as corporations function more like a democratic government in the age of self-publishing, we can learn from the problems inherent in such governance when looking to the future problems we will face with corporations.
I think there is one thing we've learned time and time again -- today's memory considerations become largely irrelevant tomorrow. Yes, someone here mentioned that people today do still have video cards with 8MB or 16MB of video RAM. However, more and more people (largely driven by gaming "needs") are running cards with 128MB, 256MB, etc. A Moore's-esque law is in effect here as well (though not as extreme as with CPU cycles). The cost of adding a bit more RAM to a video card is rapidly becoming negligible relative to the total cost of the card.
You can even ignore the compression of the data itself (Apple's approach of today) -- by the time an X implementation like this is available, there will be enough users with effectively limitless video RAM to easily store the contents for a double-buffered very high resolution display.
So while I too have plenty of machines with 8MB video cards and I won't be running these X extensions on those machines, I have little doubt that in a year or two time it will be hard *not* to buy a card that could support this. And this, I believe, is a good thing.
Think about how few fundemental changes to the X architecture have been made to take advantage of the vastly improved video cards of today. This is a project that is actually forward looking and will use the capabilities of the hardware that we will all own tomorrow, whether or not we realized we wanted it today.
Malicious virus and trojan authors spend a lot of time and energy writing code that can infect host machines across the internet and wait for incoming instructions to launch a DDOS attack against a target.
And there is actually a proposal for people to voluntarily install this on their machines? And the trigger is simply an email?
Sick of yahoo.com today? Take them down -- just spam the net with junk mail that points their site. Have a vendetta against a guy that hosts his own email over a DSL line? No problem -- you won't even need to spam that many people before their auto-crawling DDOS boxes take his server down.
In practice this one doesn't sound bad as the following conditions need to hold true:
a) the MySQL instance needs to be installed as root or other priviledged user
b) the attacker needs to have an admin account
c) the attacker needs direct access to MySQL (either via a shell account on that box or over the MySQL port)
Fortunately:
a) the default install of MySQL via RPM on RedHat is as "mysql:mysql"
b) there is no default "admin" account
c) MySQL boxes are very rarely directly exposed to the internet, and the default install does not allow remote connections at all
So even though there is a pretty bad buffer overflow, the multi-layered security approach of MySQL fends off the likelihood of widespread exploitation. Note how different this is than the SQL Server vulnerabilities that have plauged the internet for the past few years.
And it speaks to the strength of OSS that the bug was found and patched at all. And to MySQL AD for applying the patch ASAP. In the closed source world, the same type of people that find exploits like this tend to not be as respectful of the software manufacturers or their customers.
You probably didn't mean that. Or maybe you did. No matter.
Thing is, unlike the RIAA, which is fighting to maintain an artificially high pricing structure for music in the digital era, the game publishers and developers are really operating in a pretty fair and free marketplace. I.e., games are retailing for $50+ dollars because they are actually worth it. Not all games, of course, but a game like HalfLife 2, which could potentially provide hundreds of hours of entertainment, and incurring development costs in the tens of millions of dollars, certainly seem to justify a large retail price tag.
A very good strategy for buying games is to wait a few weeks -- not necessarily for the price to drop -- but rather for the unbiased, unsponsored (i.e., not payola) reviews, and to download the demo if it exists. That way you can be pretty sure you are going to get a return on your $50. If it is a console game, read the reviews and rent it first.
But definitely don't steal it via P2P. Remember, most of us probably _want_ gaming to continue to get better -- more games of the caliber of HL2 are a great thing. And as earlier Slashdot articles have pointed out, there is a low-end gaming market as well for those of whom who have neither the money nor the time to spend on a $50 game.
That said, someday there will likely be a body as stubbornly obstinate as the RIAA for games. But until then, don't hurt the industry via piracy. Ethicality aside, it is just defeating of your own self interest.
It is worth considering that "attacking Microsoft's home user monopoly" is not necessarily a core goal of Linux. In fact, one could rightly argue that the one core goal of Linux is the original goal -- to provide a free, open implementation of a UNIX-like operating system. Competing with a huge commercial entity such as Microsoft (or Sun, for that matter) is a incidental goal sponsored by some particular individuals within the Linux community and certain other corporate entities (RedHat, Lindows, IBM, etc).
Granted, there are huge gains to be seen when Linux-based systems do compete with Microsoft for the home user. The price-point of RedHat, Debian, and even LindowsOS, systems are certainly going to have a positive impact in the market vis-a-vis the pricing and licensing models for MSFT. And the relative security of Linux-based systems vs. Microsoft systems will ultimately force a shift in MSFT's strategy of preferencing convenience and feature-set over security and reliability for the home user.
But we shouldn't overlook that Linux, as an open-source, community driven project, isn't interested directly in competing with anything. We've seen various products, such as Gnome, KDE, etc., emerge to provide capabilities on top of Linux that do directly compete with MSFT, but it is important to remember that those are not core Linux values, but rather a fortunate by-product of a environment that is legitimately tired of a marketplace almost fully co-opted by a corporation that leverages it's (near) monopoly position to the utmost.
You may want to try OpenZaurus instead. It uses Opie (a gorgeous fork of Qtopia), gives you better control over how memory is used, contains a ton of improved applications, includes support for all the old applications, and runs an updated Linux kernel.
Read more about why you would want to run OpenZaurus here.
> Don't know where this is going, but I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc... my speed across the network is ridiculously faster than when I try to access outside sources.
I'm sorry, I don't believe you.
Look, the rhetoric of "I want to have file sharing programs so I can legitimately and legally under fair use laws make backup reproductions" is getting old. Not only do I not believe you, but the media does not believe you, the law does not believe you, and the industry sure-as-hell does not believe you.
People want to steal and pirate music and movies. They are doing it, and no amount of legislation and regulation is going to change that.
What does this imply? Well, quite rightly, a fundemental transformation of the actual value of art and entertainment media itself.
This has been going on since the invention of the printing press -- since the age of the bard. Over time, the cost of reproduction goes down, and thus so does the value of the individual unit of media.
The industry can fight it, but it will lose over time. That is inevitable.
However, profit can still be made. The winners will be those who offer media that can not be reproduced digitally (vinyl, packaging, etc), and those who adapt the earliest and fastest to the future economies of entertainment. Those that predict the changing value will have a head start on capturing the emerging market.
In other words, an hour of music is no longer worth $15 - $20. The earlier the industry realizes that, they better they will do.
And the sooner consumers stop trying to deceive themselves, the lawmakers,and the industry, the better this will be for all of us. Legislature is being crippled by a lying consumer (fair use, my ass), a lying producer (free market, my ass), and people trying to take advantage of the deception (Microsoft DRM, my ass).
"As the present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fading. And the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a changing."
PS: Don't believe there is a trend? Think about music in the middle ages. You had to pay someone to play. And when they were done, they were done. You'd have to pay them again to hear the music again. By the beginning of the 20th century, you could spend a fortune on a record player and another fortune on some vinyl, but you could listen as often as you liked. By the end of the 20th century, cassettes and CDs were ubiqituous and cheap, but had a cost associated with physical reproduction. Today the physical costs are nil. See the trend?
> What purpose will this serve, assuming that any terrorists who need a mobile phone will simply purchase one in another of the many countries that do provide anonymous mobiles?
What purpose does outlawing child pornography serve? People could just go to a country that doesn't outlaw child pornography.
Point being -- people don't want it happening in their own backyard and they don't want it happening on their watch. I sympathize with this sentiment.
Developers, program managers, QA engineers, and marketing leads should be held accountable for security holes found in the products they ship. Even after the fact. E.g., those responsible for the recent Slammer vulnerabilities should get smaller bonuses and performance incentives this year. This should be part of their "Trustworthy Computing" initative. If development and business owners are not being held personally accountable within Microsoft, their products are not going to improve. Period.
Decent MSFT employees stay on average 5 years. This is more than enough time for the "dis"-incentive of a post-mortem on the security of their product to have an effect.
You listening, Bill? Steve?
PS: I'm ex-MSFT. I left because while I believed in the strength of the individual developers (the best as a whole I've ever worked with) the corporate management does not listen to the actual needs of the customers. They are very, very good at listening to what the customers will buy. Unfortunately, those are two different things right now.
About time the rest of the US caught on. I've been using ENUM's since Pascal:
TYPE
Suit = { spades, hearts, clubs, diamonds };
Or C:
enum suit { SPADES, HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS };
Or Java:
public final class Suit {
public static final Suit SPADES = new Suit( "Spades" );
public static final Suit HEARTS = new Suit( "Hearts" );
public static final Suit DIAMONDS = new Suit( "Diamonds" );
public static final Suit CLUBS = new Suit( "Clubs" );
private String _name = null;
private Suit( String name ) { _name = name; }
public String toString{ return _name; } }
But that it exactly the opposite of what my girl would like. Funny, that.
We are -- going out to a restaraunt on E5th that a buddy of mine runs. Very nice place, top rated wine list, and surprisingly cheap. We're into cheap and punk rock.
Then headed off to see Ted Leo in Brooklyn. Ted's a good guy and his band absolutely rocks.
After that, back to the E. Village to Manitobas, 7B, or Ace, to -- guess what? Shoot some pool, look at people, drink some beers, hang with friends.
Then back home to put on some Mission Of Burma, the Rapture, the Clash, something like that.
Um, I'll leave out the rest. You get the idea.
So here's the answer -- know your girl. They don't all want the same thing. Mine's got a masters degree and an ivy league education and blows me away, but she'd rather rock on Valentines Day than get a massage. Course, she'd rather do this every night. Wow. I guess I really like her.
Happy Valentines Day, baby. (Granted, one thing she'll never do is read slashdot...)
> You seem to be under the impression that the OSX-icons are SVG. This is not true. They are just resource forks containing several different sized icons so that they seem to scale "magically".
Wow. I was under that impression. Thanks for clearing that up! And I have to give credit to Apple for doing an amazing job with their scaling interpolation algorithm. Certainly fooled me.
(PS, moderators -- mark the parent up as insightful.)
Right after OSX came out, I remember downloading a GTK and Gnome theme for my Linux box that copied the look, if not feel, of OSX. If I recall correctly, that theme was yanked by Apple's lawyers.
Since then I've started running a OSX box as well, and have to admit that I like the look.
Now I wonder -- would it be copyright infringement to write a script that extracted all of the SVG icons from a MacOSX box, copy them to a GTK theme directory, and run them on Linux? Thus the distributed theme itself wouldn't have any of the Apple look -- it would simply have the skeleton. The actual artwork would be copied by the end user in the privacy of their own home or office directly off a OSX box.
The second possibility for this is to be able to run, with almost the exact same look, GTK/Gnome apps on directly on OSX (Apple's release of X11 really is amazingly well done, btw). The X11 integration still wouldn't be perfect of course (apps still have a hard time mimizing to the Dock), but it would be a visual improvement. Or even integrate the ability to search a file's resources to get the SVG icon and display it in Nautilus by default.
In any case, librsvg sounds very promising. I'm impressed.
I think they ought to ban jet propulsion packs, personal helicopters, nuclear submarines, hover boards, portable cold fusion devices, warp drives, and moon lasers as well.
(As long as we're making laws against things that no one will actually ever own, we may as well cover all the bases.)
Look, as much as I resent the RIAA, I have to say that they have a total right to fill up P2P networks with bogus files that look like copyrighted material.
What, you are not able to pirate a copy of some new album? Poor baby. Pay for it. You _really_ are ripping off the artist if you steal it. Yes, you are also ripping of the RIAA (which I don't care about). But don't complain that your organized theft ring is being hampered by the rightful owners of that property.
I despise the RIAA and how it treats their artists. But for the love of all that is right, don't *steal* in reaction. That is certainly not going to make the artists lives better.
Buy from alternative record labels. Go see your friends bands live. Write your own music. Read a book. Play with your computer. Make out with your girlfriend. Or, if you really want that album, pay for it. Or don't and boycott the bad labels. *That* choice is yours.
> The big question is where the lower-capacity drives are going. It seems like a decent drive always costs about $100 - and the amount you get for your $100 keeps increasing - but where are all of the 40GB drives that should be floating around for $40 apiece?
The answer is that it is competition, largely, that drives the price down (mostly due to technology advances that introduce higher capacity drives). Not a reduced cost of manufacturing.
For example, it would cost a fortune to manufacture the 5MB IBM RAMAC 350 (as referenced in an earlier post), even today. Certainly not the fraction of a cent that the question would imply.
> 1957, the first hard drive was introduced as a component of IBM's RAMAC 350. It required 50 24-inch disks to store five megabytes (million bytes, abbreviated MB) of data and cost roughly $35,000 a year to lease - or $7,000 per megabyte per year.
Man, I knew I should have waited a little while longer before buying one of these.
It always happens. You buy the hottest/fastest toy out, and just 46 years later they're releasing something seven million times better.
Slashdot Mirror
I stand corrected -- thank you!
A hilarious side effect of this law is that you can now block news reporters from filming you at all. Simply film a few minutes of footage of your cat, the traffic, or a blank wall. Purchase a portable video players, such as the Archos AV300. Walk around in public holding the video player in the air for all to see while looping your recording. You own the rights to the recording, but you have not granted the rights to operate recording gear to anyone in your proximity.
You have now made it illegal for anyone to film you. Interestingly, you may be able to carry this device into a bank, government office, etc., and require that they turn off their security cameras as well, lest they are in violation of the law.
According to my interpretation of this law, consider the Circuit City delima. As Circuit City sells televisions and their floor models are constantly playing movies for demonstration purposes, the following things are now illegal inside the store:
* As a customer, taking a video recording of your friends with your own cell phone.
* As a customer, trying out the video recording feature of a cell phone that you are interested in purchasing.
* As a customer, trying out the video recording capabilities of a camcorder or other dv device before purchasing.
* As a salesperson, demonstrating the video capabilities of cell phones or camcorders.
* As the store itself, recording images from their own security cameras.
Because of this law, Circuit City would have to disallow their customers from trying out in the store the very products they sell, stop their salespeople from demostrating their own products, and disable their own security cameras.
Only in America, folks, would we let corporations making such a laughing stock of the public.
Just to toss this one out there --
Linux users, on average, are probably more educated than Windows users. (To avoid a flame war, note that I said "on average". Everybody and their grandmother uses Windows, thus driving the average level of education down. Whereas Linux users tend to pick it up either in high-tech jobs, implying advanced education, or in the secondary schools themselves. Although the delta may be smaller for the MMORPG market.)
More educated people tend to make more money than less educated people.
People that make more money have more money to spend on things like game subscriptions.
Hence the slightly higher subscription rate among Linux users.
Just one theory... Though my personal bet is that the driving factor is the limited competition for online games that support Linux.
In fact, we're witnessing a defining moment in history that is indeed changing, and will continue to change, corporate markets forever.
Never before has this been possible. An individual, at virtually zero cost, can now express their opinion about the acts of a corporation or their products. Prior to the explosion of the internet, the only "people" with a voice loud enough to be heard by the buying public were those that had enough financial backing to fund such a publication. That included a very short list of a) corporations, such as the one that is selling the product in question, and b) large media organizations, which are also corporations. The problem is that "a" is clearly and understandably biased -- as their only responsibility is to profit off of their own product. Unfortunately, so is "b", as the very economic viability of traditional media is co-dependent on the health of a commercial marketplace, and the advertizing dollars that support it, thus implying an inherent and unavoidable conflict of interest. While there remained the possibility that a subscriber-based review publication could remain bias-free, that only acts in the interest of those that are able and willing to pay for the unbiased report -- i.e., a small enough minority that it does not protect the general population.
But here we have an environment in which a very minimially funded voice (i.e., a private individual) can easily make themselves heard to those who want to listen. Thus the tens of millions of advertising dollars invested by the product manufacturer can be trumped by pennies invested by the masses.
In the end, what does this mean? It means that the corporation will be forced to adjust to a new market. Period. Sure, there will be court battles regarding free speach vs. trademarks and ip claims, etc., etc. But ultimately, the corporations that adjust fastest, rather than those fighting the customer, will sell more products and thus grow healthier and stronger than those that do not adjust. And those healthier corporations will be marketing products that are driven directly by consumer desires. This is a good thing for the consumer, is it not? Can you think of a counterexample, where the ultimate needs of the masses were better known by the corporation than the masses themselves?
Note that I am not saying that there are not situations in which small, informed bodies can actually make better decisions for the majority than the majority itself. However, should those decisions not be relegated to a democratically elected body -- i.e., government?
Of course, the trend of free, instantanious information dissemination across a broad spectrum of the internet tends to democracize corporations over time, thus further blurring the lines between the corporation and the government itself. A parallel, of course, being drawn with the advent of inexpensive publishing via the printing presses that drove the governments themselves toward democracy.
And, like the risk of the democracy, the needs of the few can be lost in the desires of the many. So as corporations function more like a democratic government in the age of self-publishing, we can learn from the problems inherent in such governance when looking to the future problems we will face with corporations.
What are the memory implications of this ?
I think there is one thing we've learned time and time again -- today's memory considerations become largely irrelevant tomorrow. Yes, someone here mentioned that people today do still have video cards with 8MB or 16MB of video RAM. However, more and more people (largely driven by gaming "needs") are running cards with 128MB, 256MB, etc. A Moore's-esque law is in effect here as well (though not as extreme as with CPU cycles). The cost of adding a bit more RAM to a video card is rapidly becoming negligible relative to the total cost of the card.
You can even ignore the compression of the data itself (Apple's approach of today) -- by the time an X implementation like this is available, there will be enough users with effectively limitless video RAM to easily store the contents for a double-buffered very high resolution display.
So while I too have plenty of machines with 8MB video cards and I won't be running these X extensions on those machines, I have little doubt that in a year or two time it will be hard *not* to buy a card that could support this. And this, I believe, is a good thing.
Think about how few fundemental changes to the X architecture have been made to take advantage of the vastly improved video cards of today. This is a project that is actually forward looking and will use the capabilities of the hardware that we will all own tomorrow, whether or not we realized we wanted it today.
Malicious virus and trojan authors spend a lot of time and energy writing code that can infect host machines across the internet and wait for incoming instructions to launch a DDOS attack against a target.
And there is actually a proposal for people to voluntarily install this on their machines? And the trigger is simply an email?
Sick of yahoo.com today? Take them down -- just spam the net with junk mail that points their site. Have a vendetta against a guy that hosts his own email over a DSL line? No problem -- you won't even need to spam that many people before their auto-crawling DDOS boxes take his server down.
Yikes.
In practice this one doesn't sound bad as the following conditions need to hold true:
a) the MySQL instance needs to be installed as root or other priviledged user
b) the attacker needs to have an admin account
c) the attacker needs direct access to MySQL (either via a shell account on that box or over the MySQL port)
Fortunately:
a) the default install of MySQL via RPM on RedHat is as "mysql:mysql"
b) there is no default "admin" account
c) MySQL boxes are very rarely directly exposed to the internet, and the default install does not allow remote connections at all
So even though there is a pretty bad buffer overflow, the multi-layered security approach of MySQL fends off the likelihood of widespread exploitation. Note how different this is than the SQL Server vulnerabilities that have plauged the internet for the past few years.
And it speaks to the strength of OSS that the bug was found and patched at all. And to MySQL AD for applying the patch ASAP. In the closed source world, the same type of people that find exploits like this tend to not be as respectful of the software manufacturers or their customers.
You probably didn't mean that. Or maybe you did. No matter.
Thing is, unlike the RIAA, which is fighting to maintain an artificially high pricing structure for music in the digital era, the game publishers and developers are really operating in a pretty fair and free marketplace. I.e., games are retailing for $50+ dollars because they are actually worth it. Not all games, of course, but a game like HalfLife 2, which could potentially provide hundreds of hours of entertainment, and incurring development costs in the tens of millions of dollars, certainly seem to justify a large retail price tag.
A very good strategy for buying games is to wait a few weeks -- not necessarily for the price to drop -- but rather for the unbiased, unsponsored (i.e., not payola) reviews, and to download the demo if it exists. That way you can be pretty sure you are going to get a return on your $50. If it is a console game, read the reviews and rent it first.
But definitely don't steal it via P2P. Remember, most of us probably _want_ gaming to continue to get better -- more games of the caliber of HL2 are a great thing. And as earlier Slashdot articles have pointed out, there is a low-end gaming market as well for those of whom who have neither the money nor the time to spend on a $50 game.
That said, someday there will likely be a body as stubbornly obstinate as the RIAA for games. But until then, don't hurt the industry via piracy. Ethicality aside, it is just defeating of your own self interest.
It is worth considering that "attacking Microsoft's home user monopoly" is not necessarily a core goal of Linux. In fact, one could rightly argue that the one core goal of Linux is the original goal -- to provide a free, open implementation of a UNIX-like operating system. Competing with a huge commercial entity such as Microsoft (or Sun, for that matter) is a incidental goal sponsored by some particular individuals within the Linux community and certain other corporate entities (RedHat, Lindows, IBM, etc).
Granted, there are huge gains to be seen when Linux-based systems do compete with Microsoft for the home user. The price-point of RedHat, Debian, and even LindowsOS, systems are certainly going to have a positive impact in the market vis-a-vis the pricing and licensing models for MSFT. And the relative security of Linux-based systems vs. Microsoft systems will ultimately force a shift in MSFT's strategy of preferencing convenience and feature-set over security and reliability for the home user.
But we shouldn't overlook that Linux, as an open-source, community driven project, isn't interested directly in competing with anything. We've seen various products, such as Gnome, KDE, etc., emerge to provide capabilities on top of Linux that do directly compete with MSFT, but it is important to remember that those are not core Linux values, but rather a fortunate by-product of a environment that is legitimately tired of a marketplace almost fully co-opted by a corporation that leverages it's (near) monopoly position to the utmost.
You may want to try OpenZaurus instead. It uses Opie (a gorgeous fork of Qtopia), gives you better control over how memory is used, contains a ton of improved applications, includes support for all the old applications, and runs an updated Linux kernel.
Read more about why you would want to run OpenZaurus here.
> Don't know where this is going, but I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc... my speed across the network is ridiculously faster than when I try to access outside sources.
I'm sorry, I don't believe you.
Look, the rhetoric of "I want to have file sharing programs so I can legitimately and legally under fair use laws make backup reproductions" is getting old. Not only do I not believe you, but the media does not believe you, the law does not believe you, and the industry sure-as-hell does not believe you.
People want to steal and pirate music and movies. They are doing it, and no amount of legislation and regulation is going to change that.
What does this imply? Well, quite rightly, a fundemental transformation of the actual value of art and entertainment media itself.
This has been going on since the invention of the printing press -- since the age of the bard. Over time, the cost of reproduction goes down, and thus so does the value of the individual unit of media.
The industry can fight it, but it will lose over time. That is inevitable.
However, profit can still be made. The winners will be those who offer media that can not be reproduced digitally (vinyl, packaging, etc), and those who adapt the earliest and fastest to the future economies of entertainment. Those that predict the changing value will have a head start on capturing the emerging market.
In other words, an hour of music is no longer worth $15 - $20. The earlier the industry realizes that, they better they will do.
And the sooner consumers stop trying to deceive themselves, the lawmakers,and the industry, the better this will be for all of us. Legislature is being crippled by a lying consumer (fair use, my ass), a lying producer (free market, my ass), and people trying to take advantage of the deception (Microsoft DRM, my ass).
"As the present now will later be past, the order is rapidly fading. And the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a changing."
PS: Don't believe there is a trend? Think about music in the middle ages. You had to pay someone to play. And when they were done, they were done. You'd have to pay them again to hear the music again. By the beginning of the 20th century, you could spend a fortune on a record player and another fortune on some vinyl, but you could listen as often as you liked. By the end of the 20th century, cassettes and CDs were ubiqituous and cheap, but had a cost associated with physical reproduction. Today the physical costs are nil. See the trend?
> What purpose will this serve, assuming that any terrorists who need a mobile phone will simply purchase one in another of the many countries that do provide anonymous mobiles?
What purpose does outlawing child pornography serve? People could just go to a country that doesn't outlaw child pornography.
Point being -- people don't want it happening in their own backyard and they don't want it happening on their watch. I sympathize with this sentiment.
Sounds a lot like what Apple did with OS X's Frameworks.
Read more about that here. Be sure to read through the section on Framework Versioning.
Also note that MacOS has long done a great job at packaging applications together so that the installer is unecessary.
Developers, program managers, QA engineers, and marketing leads should be held accountable for security holes found in the products they ship. Even after the fact. E.g., those responsible for the recent Slammer vulnerabilities should get smaller bonuses and performance incentives this year. This should be part of their "Trustworthy Computing" initative. If development and business owners are not being held personally accountable within Microsoft, their products are not going to improve. Period.
Decent MSFT employees stay on average 5 years. This is more than enough time for the "dis"-incentive of a post-mortem on the security of their product to have an effect.
You listening, Bill? Steve?
PS: I'm ex-MSFT. I left because while I believed in the strength of the individual developers (the best as a whole I've ever worked with) the corporate management does not listen to the actual needs of the customers. They are very, very good at listening to what the customers will buy. Unfortunately, those are two different things right now.
> Wouldn't it be cool if Atari open the source up on all their games?
Think they still have it?
I work for a Fortune 500 company, and we can't find the source code to some of our production systems.
Wait, I shouldn't admit that, should I?
I'm sure they'll come out with a patch sometime in the next 12 weeks, 4 days, 21 hours, and 20 minutes.
(Oops, 15 minutes. It took me a few to divide.)
Hey, that's a great post and rather good advice.
But that it exactly the opposite of what my girl would like. Funny, that.
We are -- going out to a restaraunt on E5th that a buddy of mine runs. Very nice place, top rated wine list, and surprisingly cheap. We're into cheap and punk rock.
Then headed off to see Ted Leo in Brooklyn. Ted's a good guy and his band absolutely rocks.
After that, back to the E. Village to Manitobas, 7B, or Ace, to -- guess what? Shoot some pool, look at people, drink some beers, hang with friends.
Then back home to put on some Mission Of Burma, the Rapture, the Clash, something like that.
Um, I'll leave out the rest. You get the idea.
So here's the answer -- know your girl. They don't all want the same thing. Mine's got a masters degree and an ivy league education and blows me away, but she'd rather rock on Valentines Day than get a massage. Course, she'd rather do this every night. Wow. I guess I really like her.
Happy Valentines Day, baby. (Granted, one thing she'll never do is read slashdot...)
> You seem to be under the impression that the OSX-icons are SVG. This is not true. They are just resource forks containing several different sized icons so that they seem to scale "magically".
Wow. I was under that impression. Thanks for clearing that up! And I have to give credit to Apple for doing an amazing job with their scaling interpolation algorithm. Certainly fooled me.
(PS, moderators -- mark the parent up as insightful.)
Right after OSX came out, I remember downloading a GTK and Gnome theme for my Linux box that copied the look, if not feel, of OSX. If I recall correctly, that theme was yanked by Apple's lawyers.
Since then I've started running a OSX box as well, and have to admit that I like the look.
Now I wonder -- would it be copyright infringement to write a script that extracted all of the SVG icons from a MacOSX box, copy them to a GTK theme directory, and run them on Linux? Thus the distributed theme itself wouldn't have any of the Apple look -- it would simply have the skeleton. The actual artwork would be copied by the end user in the privacy of their own home or office directly off a OSX box.
The second possibility for this is to be able to run, with almost the exact same look, GTK/Gnome apps on directly on OSX (Apple's release of X11 really is amazingly well done, btw). The X11 integration still wouldn't be perfect of course (apps still have a hard time mimizing to the Dock), but it would be a visual improvement. Or even integrate the ability to search a file's resources to get the SVG icon and display it in Nautilus by default.
In any case, librsvg sounds very promising. I'm impressed.
I think they ought to ban jet propulsion packs, personal helicopters, nuclear submarines, hover boards, portable cold fusion devices, warp drives, and moon lasers as well.
(As long as we're making laws against things that no one will actually ever own, we may as well cover all the bases.)
Look, as much as I resent the RIAA, I have to say that they have a total right to fill up P2P networks with bogus files that look like copyrighted material.
What, you are not able to pirate a copy of some new album? Poor baby. Pay for it. You _really_ are ripping off the artist if you steal it. Yes, you are also ripping of the RIAA (which I don't care about). But don't complain that your organized theft ring is being hampered by the rightful owners of that property.
I despise the RIAA and how it treats their artists. But for the love of all that is right, don't *steal* in reaction. That is certainly not going to make the artists lives better.
Buy from alternative record labels. Go see your friends bands live. Write your own music. Read a book. Play with your computer. Make out with your girlfriend. Or, if you really want that album, pay for it. Or don't and boycott the bad labels. *That* choice is yours.
> The big question is where the lower-capacity drives are going. It seems like a decent drive always costs about $100 - and the amount you get for your $100 keeps increasing - but where are all of the 40GB drives that should be floating around for $40 apiece?
The answer is that it is competition, largely, that drives the price down (mostly due to technology advances that introduce higher capacity drives). Not a reduced cost of manufacturing.
For example, it would cost a fortune to manufacture the 5MB IBM RAMAC 350 (as referenced in an earlier post), even today. Certainly not the fraction of a cent that the question would imply.
> 1957, the first hard drive was introduced as a component of IBM's RAMAC 350. It required 50 24-inch disks to store five megabytes (million bytes, abbreviated MB) of data and cost roughly $35,000 a year to lease - or $7,000 per megabyte per year.
Man, I knew I should have waited a little while longer before buying one of these.
It always happens. You buy the hottest/fastest toy out, and just 46 years later they're releasing something seven million times better.