It doesn't help that the DVD player kits (really just a remote and an infrared dongle) for the PS2 and Xbox cost $30, or about 1/3 the price of a cheap DVD player. Can you even play DVDs using the controller as a wired remote?
PGP versions 6 and 7 had both Freeware (free beer, for noncommercial use only) and Professional versions. If NA is trying to shut down PGP Freeware downloads, it's bogus. This is sections 1 and 3 from the PGP Freeware 6.5.8 license. Section 1.b grants the right to distribute unmodified copies. Section 3 states the term of the agreement, forever as long as the user violates the license. I was half expecting to find it, but they do NOT say "We reserve the right to change these licensing terms at any time without notice".
1. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Network Associates hereby grants to you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use, copy and distribute solely for Non-Commercial Purposes (as defined below) the specified version of the Software and the accompanying documentation (the "Documentation"). a. For purposes of the foregoing, "non-commercial purposes" means non-commercial, non-governmental use, including, without limitation, home use for personal correspondence, student or academic use, or use by non-profit human rights organizations. The Software is "in use" when it is loaded into the temporary memory (i.e., RAM) or installed into the permanent memory (e.g., hard disk, CD ROM, or other storage device) of a computer for the purpose of being accessible in client-mode by an end user. b. You may make exact, unmodified copies of the Software and distribute such copies solely (i) by electronic means; (ii) for Non-Commercial Purposes; and (iii) with all proprietary notices (including without limitation all copyright notices and this End User License Agreement) intact and unmodified or obscured. 3. Term. This Agreement is effective unless and until earlier terminated as set forth herein. This Agreement will terminate automatically if you fail to comply with any of the limitations or other requirements described herein. Upon any termination or expiration of this Agreement, you must destroy all copies of the Software and the Documentation.
Re:The laws we had 10 years ago
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 2
It's funny that you mention 10 years ago, because 10 years ago the newest copyright law in the US was the Audio Home Recording Act, a surprisingly balanced law compared to later laws like the DMCA (what happened? did Hollywood just buy better lobbyists in those 6 years from 1992-1998). It established statuory royalties (a tax) on blank recording media, SCMS copy protection on digital recorders (1st generation copies only; no copies of copies) and legalized (or decriminalized) all non-commercial personal copying using said media. Sure, the tax on blank media sucks if you're recording your own original works, but for now it's a reasonably low fee- $.50 per audio CD. Kazaa and Verizon proposed a similar payment model last week for ISP service.
That's right. Sexual attraction between men and women is natural. Pair bonding (the biologists' term for love) is also natural. Traditional societies attempted to suppress these natural instincts through practices such as segregation, arranged marriages and female circumcision.
That's right. Fake name, fake birthday, ZIP code 90210. But I did an oopsie when I went in to change my profile. Just to be funny, I thought I give them an even faker birthday than the fake one I put in, but I locked myself out of my account because now it thinks I'm 3 years old and I need my parent's permission to confirm my account. Oh well, guess I'll have to make another fake hotmail account with an adult age to give my first account his parent's permission.
Does anybody else get the symbolism yet? 76? As in 1776, Declaration of Independence, freedom (in this case freedom from Microsoft).
$76 isn't dirt cheap, but it's pretty cheap considering its liberal licensing terms. According to the press release, the $76 single user license can be installed on up to FIVE computers. Enterprise licensing is about $50 per seat. The only catch for the low price is bare bones support. You get online support (not a bad deal if it's as good as the Sunsolve Solaris support website) and one free support call. Presumably they'd charge more for higher level support contracts. The sad part is, Microsoft's support for a $700 retail Office XP isn't any better than Sun's lowest level support on $76 Staroffice. Do you even get a free support call with retail Office XP?
Dell sells the Optiplex GX240 small form factor PC with up to a 2.4Ghz P4, and it's even smaller than these cubes- 3.6" x 12.5" x 13.9".
I think they're competitively priced to these barebones systems. A GX50 SFF is under $600 (1.2Ghz Celeron, on-board video, 1 low-profile PCI slot). A GX240 with a decent setup for gamers is $900 (1.7Ghz P4, Radeon VE, 1 low-pro PCI slot, and 1 low-pro AGP slot if you toss the Radeon VE). Pricing gets outrageous if you want top-of-the-line P4s, but that's Intel for you. The only other problem is the limited selection of low-profile AGP cards, and you'd have that problem with any Flex-ATX system.
A common practice in industry is to keep source code of custom apps in escrow, with the understanding that if the original developers go out of business or stop supporting their software, the source code is released to the customer.
Maybe long ago in Internet time, but just 10 years ago they still had a reputation for quality and engineering excellence, a reputation they built up over 40-50 years that was pissed away in less than 10 by the new management (as someone else said maybe Agilent now carries the torch now). You can precisely trace the rising shittyness of their products with the growing influence of Carly and the new management team. Sad....
Mozilla's been great through the 0.9.x releases, but I noticed a few more bugs in the Win32 RC1. All browser windows hang when one window is waiting to load. The mouse cursor sometimes gets stuck on the resize cursor instead of the pointer and I can't click anything anymore. I hope RC2 is better.
Re:Sony == DMCA. Bad people. M'kay?
on
Sony PCG-U1
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· Score: 2
Maybe Sony pays people to read Slashdot and so they can mod down anti-Sony comments. Personally I thought the OP was legit too. Sony==RIAA+MPAA
Yes, it is about cutting costs, but if anyone else could do it to save costs they would. In the computer OEM world, shipping a OS-less is an extraordinary act of defiance against Microsoft. Walmart is big, powerful and diversified enough to get away with this. Microsoft has no leverage against them. What'll they do? Cut their Xbox allotment? Screw them on pricing for their Windows site license? If they're not 100% the Good Guy, at least the Titans of Industry are fighting each other instead of ganging up on the Little Guy.
Careful if you recycle the case on a Dell. Some of their power supplies and motherboards are incompatible with standard ATX (one reversed pair of pins in the power plug) for no good reason other than to lock you in to their expensive replacement parts.
Ever hear about those tires that were designed so well that they would never need to be replace? no
I'll bet. Right next to the 80MPG carburetor and the pill that turns water into gasoline. But seriously, lots of tires out there already last 60-70,000 miles which is close to half the useful life of a new car. One big problem with the Firestones was that the tread lasted so long, it gave a huge window for the tire carcass to be exposed to damaging conditions. Detroit used to build cars that fell apart after the warranty ran out, but then the Japanese started selling cars that last 200,000 mi with nothing more than scheduled maintenance. If you build crap, eventually people will learn.
I'm shocked, shocked I say, to find that Creative is releasing crappy hardware with buggy drivers.... NOT! So far I've bought from them: a crappy CT7160 DVD decoder that can't letterbox widescreen movies (stretched them to the full height of the TV), a Creative Webcam 3 that never worked right (gave up and threw it out), a Creative Nomad I with slow, unreliable parallel port transfers (no 2000 drivers and don't use it since I got my Rio Volt), and a Soundblaster Live! Value that works fine (don't run XP so buggy XP drivers didn't affect me). I guess 1 out of 4 ain't bad. No more Creative crap for me.
Yes, I really had a Mac SE with System 6. It couldn't run System 7. Sure, the disks were slow, and processor intensive tasks were slow (note: I do not consider drawing the GUI a processor intensive task), but I could type stuff in Word, plot a graph in Excel or do some little line-drawing in MacDraw. Menus popped up without much lag, and the cursor only got jumpy when you were saving to floppy (and 10 years later that's still true).
"Apple is doing the correct thing. They made a huge jump in software, after ~8 years of that same basic OS design."
Modern CPUs have such a surplus of processing power, it's shameful they can't make a responsive UI w/ an 800Mhz G4. The thing I liked about my old Mac was, even with a 8Mhz Mac SE, the UI was snappy. Menus popped up fast and the mouse cursor was smooth. It's not like they're doing serious number crunching. It's just drawing some window widgets and putting up some text. Hell, even the Next black boxes ran Display Postscript on a 68040.
Yup, all that hidden camera footage on those undercover scam artist, restaurant kitchen and slaughterhouse news stories would be illegal under this bill. And if you shoot the next Rodney King video, you bet they'll use this against you, public space or not.
Not any worse than releasing Netscape 6.0 based on Mozilla (what was it 0.7?) Now THAT was a half-baked release, the lamest excuse for a.0 release since maybe Windows 1.0.
If they had stuck to the time limit spelled out in the Constitution for copyrights, all music up to Hall and Oates, The Go Go's, Culture Club, Def Leppard, and Motley Crue would be public domain now. The perpetual extension of copyright terms is government intervention that inflates the profitability of their business model. The life+70 or 95 years term we have now is unreal.
I believed he means creeped out as in repulsed by slimy salesmen. Since used goods are more open to negotiation in price than new goods, they tend to encourage slimy sales tactics. Amazon charges a hefty markup on their used books. Maybe not as bad as used textbooks at the college bookstore (buy back at 25% new, sell at 80%), but still a healthy profit.
It's not the same as IP spoofing, but you can easily hide your IP using a free http proxy. There's thousands of them out there. Highly recommended if you're gonna build a crapflooding spider.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't help that the DVD player kits (really just a remote and an infrared dongle) for the PS2 and Xbox cost $30, or about 1/3 the price of a cheap DVD player. Can you even play DVDs using the controller as a wired remote?
"term of the agreement, forever as long as the user violates the license"
oops that should read, "forever as long as the user does not violate the license"
PGP versions 6 and 7 had both Freeware (free beer, for noncommercial use only) and Professional versions. If NA is trying to shut down PGP Freeware downloads, it's bogus. This is sections 1 and 3 from the PGP Freeware 6.5.8 license. Section 1.b grants the right to distribute unmodified copies. Section 3 states the term of the agreement, forever as long as the user violates the license. I was half expecting to find it, but they do NOT say "We reserve the right to change these licensing terms at any time without notice".
1. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Network Associates hereby grants to you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use, copy and distribute solely for Non-Commercial Purposes (as defined below) the specified version of the Software and the accompanying documentation (the "Documentation").
a. For purposes of the foregoing, "non-commercial purposes" means non-commercial, non-governmental use, including, without limitation, home use for personal correspondence, student or academic use, or use by non-profit human rights organizations. The Software is "in use" when it is loaded into the temporary memory (i.e., RAM) or installed into the permanent memory (e.g., hard disk, CD ROM, or other storage device) of a computer for the purpose of being accessible in client-mode by an end user.
b. You may make exact, unmodified copies of the Software and distribute such copies solely (i) by electronic means; (ii) for Non-Commercial Purposes; and (iii) with all proprietary notices (including without limitation all copyright notices and this End User License Agreement) intact and unmodified or obscured.
3. Term. This Agreement is effective unless and until earlier terminated as set forth herein. This Agreement will terminate automatically if you fail to comply with any of the limitations or other requirements described herein. Upon any termination or expiration of this Agreement, you must destroy all copies of the Software and the Documentation.
It's funny that you mention 10 years ago, because 10 years ago the newest copyright law in the US was the Audio Home Recording Act, a surprisingly balanced law compared to later laws like the DMCA (what happened? did Hollywood just buy better lobbyists in those 6 years from 1992-1998). It established statuory royalties (a tax) on blank recording media, SCMS copy protection on digital recorders (1st generation copies only; no copies of copies) and legalized (or decriminalized) all non-commercial personal copying using said media. Sure, the tax on blank media sucks if you're recording your own original works, but for now it's a reasonably low fee- $.50 per audio CD. Kazaa and Verizon proposed a similar payment model last week for ISP service.
That's right. Sexual attraction between men and women is natural. Pair bonding (the biologists' term for love) is also natural. Traditional societies attempted to suppress these natural instincts through practices such as segregation, arranged marriages and female circumcision.
That's right. Fake name, fake birthday, ZIP code 90210. But I did an oopsie when I went in to change my profile. Just to be funny, I thought I give them an even faker birthday than the fake one I put in, but I locked myself out of my account because now it thinks I'm 3 years old and I need my parent's permission to confirm my account. Oh well, guess I'll have to make another fake hotmail account with an adult age to give my first account his parent's permission.
Does anybody else get the symbolism yet? 76? As in 1776, Declaration of Independence, freedom (in this case freedom from Microsoft).
$76 isn't dirt cheap, but it's pretty cheap considering its liberal licensing terms. According to the press release, the $76 single user license can be installed on up to FIVE computers. Enterprise licensing is about $50 per seat. The only catch for the low price is bare bones support. You get online support (not a bad deal if it's as good as the Sunsolve Solaris support website) and one free support call. Presumably they'd charge more for higher level support contracts. The sad part is, Microsoft's support for a $700 retail Office XP isn't any better than Sun's lowest level support on $76 Staroffice. Do you even get a free support call with retail Office XP?
Dell sells the Optiplex GX240 small form factor PC with up to a 2.4Ghz P4, and it's even smaller than these cubes- 3.6" x 12.5" x 13.9".
I think they're competitively priced to these barebones systems. A GX50 SFF is under $600 (1.2Ghz Celeron, on-board video, 1 low-profile PCI slot). A GX240 with a decent setup for gamers is $900 (1.7Ghz P4, Radeon VE, 1 low-pro PCI slot, and 1 low-pro AGP slot if you toss the Radeon VE). Pricing gets outrageous if you want top-of-the-line P4s, but that's Intel for you. The only other problem is the limited selection of low-profile AGP cards, and you'd have that problem with any Flex-ATX system.
A common practice in industry is to keep source code of custom apps in escrow, with the understanding that if the original developers go out of business or stop supporting their software, the source code is released to the customer.
Maybe long ago in Internet time, but just 10 years ago they still had a reputation for quality and engineering excellence, a reputation they built up over 40-50 years that was pissed away in less than 10 by the new management (as someone else said maybe Agilent now carries the torch now). You can precisely trace the rising shittyness of their products with the growing influence of Carly and the new management team. Sad....
Mozilla's been great through the 0.9.x releases, but I noticed a few more bugs in the Win32 RC1. All browser windows hang when one window is waiting to load. The mouse cursor sometimes gets stuck on the resize cursor instead of the pointer and I can't click anything anymore. I hope RC2 is better.
Maybe Sony pays people to read Slashdot and so they can mod down anti-Sony comments. Personally I thought the OP was legit too. Sony==RIAA+MPAA
Yes, it is about cutting costs, but if anyone else could do it to save costs they would. In the computer OEM world, shipping a OS-less is an extraordinary act of defiance against Microsoft. Walmart is big, powerful and diversified enough to get away with this. Microsoft has no leverage against them. What'll they do? Cut their Xbox allotment? Screw them on pricing for their Windows site license? If they're not 100% the Good Guy, at least the Titans of Industry are fighting each other instead of ganging up on the Little Guy.
Careful if you recycle the case on a Dell. Some of their power supplies and motherboards are incompatible with standard ATX (one reversed pair of pins in the power plug) for no good reason other than to lock you in to their expensive replacement parts.
"Besides, what's wrong with a bicycle? Cheaper, faster, and good exercise."
Obviously, the bicycle makers aren't as well-connected politically so bicycles aren't allowed on sidewalks.
I agree, mobilecomputing.com has good reviews. This one is good. They even do a keyboard spill and multiple drop tests.
I'll bet. Right next to the 80MPG carburetor and the pill that turns water into gasoline. But seriously, lots of tires out there already last 60-70,000 miles which is close to half the useful life of a new car. One big problem with the Firestones was that the tread lasted so long, it gave a huge window for the tire carcass to be exposed to damaging conditions. Detroit used to build cars that fell apart after the warranty ran out, but then the Japanese started selling cars that last 200,000 mi with nothing more than scheduled maintenance. If you build crap, eventually people will learn.
I'm shocked, shocked I say, to find that Creative is releasing crappy hardware with buggy drivers.... NOT! So far I've bought from them: a crappy CT7160 DVD decoder that can't letterbox widescreen movies (stretched them to the full height of the TV), a Creative Webcam 3 that never worked right (gave up and threw it out), a Creative Nomad I with slow, unreliable parallel port transfers (no 2000 drivers and don't use it since I got my Rio Volt), and a Soundblaster Live! Value that works fine (don't run XP so buggy XP drivers didn't affect me). I guess 1 out of 4 ain't bad. No more Creative crap for me.
Yes, I really had a Mac SE with System 6. It couldn't run System 7. Sure, the disks were slow, and processor intensive tasks were slow (note: I do not consider drawing the GUI a processor intensive task), but I could type stuff in Word, plot a graph in Excel or do some little line-drawing in MacDraw. Menus popped up without much lag, and the cursor only got jumpy when you were saving to floppy (and 10 years later that's still true).
"Apple is doing the correct thing. They made a huge jump in software, after ~8 years of that same basic OS design."
Modern CPUs have such a surplus of processing power, it's shameful they can't make a responsive UI w/ an 800Mhz G4. The thing I liked about my old Mac was, even with a 8Mhz Mac SE, the UI was snappy. Menus popped up fast and the mouse cursor was smooth. It's not like they're doing serious number crunching. It's just drawing some window widgets and putting up some text. Hell, even the Next black boxes ran Display Postscript on a 68040.
Yup, all that hidden camera footage on those undercover scam artist, restaurant kitchen and slaughterhouse news stories would be illegal under this bill. And if you shoot the next Rodney King video, you bet they'll use this against you, public space or not.
Not any worse than releasing Netscape 6.0 based on Mozilla (what was it 0.7?) Now THAT was a half-baked release, the lamest excuse for a .0 release since maybe Windows 1.0.
If they had stuck to the time limit spelled out in the Constitution for copyrights, all music up to Hall and Oates, The Go Go's, Culture Club, Def Leppard, and Motley Crue would be public domain now. The perpetual extension of copyright terms is government intervention that inflates the profitability of their business model. The life+70 or 95 years term we have now is unreal.
I believed he means creeped out as in repulsed by slimy salesmen. Since used goods are more open to negotiation in price than new goods, they tend to encourage slimy sales tactics. Amazon charges a hefty markup on their used books. Maybe not as bad as used textbooks at the college bookstore (buy back at 25% new, sell at 80%), but still a healthy profit.
It's not the same as IP spoofing, but you can easily hide your IP using a free http proxy. There's thousands of them out there. Highly recommended if you're gonna build a crapflooding spider.