> Another way to think about it - you are now vulnerable to local root exploits not only > in packages you installed, but also in packages you chose not to install.
DING! You nailed it. The attack surface has been expanded to include every package in every enabled repo. Find a local root exploit in any one of them and you get the machine.
This is totally stupid. It makes the assumption that every user is an admin, which was exactly the idiocy we have, rightly, laughed at Microsoft for years over. Microsoft has been working at correcting that mistake while we have been adopting it. And it isn't just Fedora, this apparently came from upstream at PackgeKit so unless this gets nipped in the bud it will spread to everyone else.
The root of the problem is that decisions that impact security are being made by marketing people more concerned with the 'year of the Linux desktop'. And again, wasn't this exactly what we slagged Microsoft over in the past? As Linux nears readiness for mass consumption we find ourselves making exactly the same mistakes for exactly the same reasons. We are tossing decades of hard won security knowledge onto the altar of user friendliness.
> Check IBM and other hardware vendors for PPC and Power CPUs.
And how many people are going to run Fedora on a stack of blades? The only reason Fedora PPC still exists is because RH sells enough RHEL to those customers to justify it.
> Do you know what CPU is in the Wii and XBox360?
Do you know that Fedora doesn't run on either of those platforms? And even if you could break the hardware DRM, the lack of drivers, etc. and shovel it on the hardware, the resources suck on both. The Wii is pitiful and the Xbox is underendowed enough in the ram dept that Fedora would be an unpleasant experience.
> Have you used Fedora recently?
F12 is downloading currently at home on my F11 desktop. I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X31 running F11. Fedora sucks. The other choices suck more, especially since I have invested over a decade in RH based distros and know how to work around their suckage more. Now get the hell off my lawn ya punk kid!
> It has come along ways since 1.0, and 2.0 where it required a lot of resources.
What the hell are you babbling about? FC1 and FC2 were slim petite distros compared to F11. Anaconda did have some serious bloat back around that time which pushed the minimum ram to install up beyond what you needed to actually use the machine after the install, but now you can't really use a machine that was current in the F1 timeframe without upgrading pretty much everything in the box.
> What you are saying is like, why do people care about Gnu/Linux, when there is OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.
No. What I am saying is that until we decide to stop trying to chase Apple and Microsoft's taillights and instead try to make Linux the best *NIX in the world we are doomed to bloat. If you don't like that and want to actually use older hardware you currently have no choice other than to use an unbloated traditional UNIX such as NetBSD or OpenBSD.
The comment about Solaris should have been simple enough to understand. Seriously, how many people are buying current SPARC64 hardware to run anything but Solaris on? And because the number buying SPARC hardware has been pitiful for years there isn't much old stuff to repurpose anymore until you go back to truly ancient gear.
Dude, PPC is dead so get over it. The PS3/Cell was the last hardware you could actually buy and it dropped support for Linux in the latest hardware rev. And the previous support was crippled to the point of pointlessness.
SPARC is long in the grave. SPARC64 is still around but again, nobody actually has anything other than old ancient stuff that isn't going to have the resources for a pig[1] like Fedora. Excepting a few peeps buying new hardware, but they are going to run Solaris on new gear. Old zombie platforms is what NetBSD is for.
Itanium? Yes HP is still making a half-hearted effort to move units but really. Nice try but it too has failed in the marketplace.
These days the action is in small. ARM and MIPS are what we should be looking for in ports these days.
[1] No a slam, if you track current desktops, OO.o, FF, etc. the result is going to oink.
> Helping people is at best a secondary motive and sometimes not even not even a motive at all.
The UN actually does a good job doing what they were designed to do. It is just that most people were misled as to what they were designed to do. Look at how the UN was organized, one nation state, one vote in a world where most were unfree hellholes. The UN is thus essentially a Parliment of Tyrants, by design. So look at it's output and you will see it is actualy doing a good job of advancing the march of tyrany and human rights abuse.
Turning the Internet over to the UN must, as night follows day, lead to the advancement of the goals of tyrants. Anyone shocked by this simply wasn't paying attention.
You are of course making one fatal assumption, that a EULA is worth the paper it is printed on. And more importantly, that they should be. If they are both legal and moral we are boned. Is saving Apple's broken business model worth giving up the fight against EULAs over?
If stuff in boxes apparently sold in stores is in fact only licensed it is game over for freedom. It really is just that simple. If what looks like a sale isn't when Apple does it, it isn't a sale when Walmart sells you a DVD either. So in your world it isn't just illegal when I watch one on my Linux PC or when you shift one to your iPod, it is immoral.
Think I'm exagerating? How? The make the exact same argument, that the DVD you think you bought was only licensed to you. That you agree that you will only use that DVD with DVD-CCA licensed players in exactly the same way Apple insists you may only use their DVD on an Apple licensed 'player'.
Exactly the same arguments apply regarding the DMCA. If you want to live in a world where that horror is not only the law but morally defensible then again, it is game over.
Note that in none of the arguments I make here is it required to believe copyright is wrong. The idea of copyright is in no way impaired if I play a DVD on my PC, you stuff one on your iPod or when somebody buys a copy of OS X and puts it on the machine of their choice. Same when Pystar sells you a Mac clone, so long as they buy a copy of OS X with each one and that copy goes out the door with the machine.
In any other case the slashdot crowd would be raging and the megacorp who crushed the small upstart's website would be hacked, but wouldn't be visible because of the simultanious DDoS attack. Only because the megacorp is Apple and the rules with them are somehow different.
Seriously. Find me another case where Slashdot cheers a EULA being upheld. Find me another case where a DMCA attack is applauded. Listen up ya numbbuts, EULAs are always evil. The DMCA is always evil. Even when Steve Jobs is crushing a small competitor. What Pystar was doing may be illegal (I'd argue that point though) but I double dog dare any fanboy to stand up here and defend the MORAL position Apple took.
Either what Apple sells in those boxes are full copies of OS X or they are upgrades. Apple insists they are full copies when it suits their arguments AND equally insists they are mere upgrades when they need to crush Pystar. Make up yer fracking minds.
Most of the calls to do dumb things like this comes from people who don't have a clue though and after all the yelling they eventually shut up. The notable thing about this one was this guy actually produced code. But just because somebody writes some code to do something bad doesn't mean it has to go in. Lots of code never completes the process of getting merged.
And just look how screwed the Free Software movement would have been had we listened to the loudmouthed know nothings over the years.
We would be suffering from:
1. A registry... and like Microsoft trying to find a way out of that swamp. Oh you are probably too young but I remember the frequent, loud and certain they were right Microsoft taillight chasers back in the late 1990's who insisted that if we didn't move everything into a binary registry we would be doomed to fall behind the times and be forgotten.
2. We would have dumped X. Scads of people who don't even understand the difference between GNOME/KDE and X still pontificate here on/. about the need to dump X for a 'modern' (read Microsoft clone that can run DirectX games perfectly) design on almost a monthly rate.
3. Linux would be using shims to run with Windows device drivers, because 'everyone knows' Linux will never have enough device driver support for "The Year of the Linux Desktop" to come about. Funny how we now have deeper driver support than Vista/Win7.
4. Or Linux would have a fixed driver API, again because we could 'never' get sufficient driver support with only Free drivers and vendors need a fixed driver ABI to code their closed horrid crap against.
Fat binaries are a solution to a problem we don't have. Distros had a problem Apple & Microsoft didn't, how to deal with thousands of components in a sane way. In solving that they evolved modern package manager and repo technology to the point where it works so much better than the stand alone installer there is no point supporting that broken model. And once you accept the logic of a repo and a package manager the need for fat binaries vanishes.
One advance in package management I would like to see is user local package installation. Obviously it wouldn't work for packages that need enhanced rights but it would be good for most end user apps and would allow users on a multiuser system to add software into their home directory without needing an admin.
> The advantage is on the typical user side. As a Mac user over two architecture > transitions, I've really appreciated just being able to pull down a single executable > from a site and have it "just work".
Here is a hint. Don't come from a Mac to UNIX and expect things to work like you expect. Same for those coming from Windows. Things are different here. That is the point, Mac/Windows/UNIX/Linux have different philosophies and assumptions, not just some minor variation in widgets and file naming conventions.
We use package managers here. You aren't supposed to download an executable from some webpage and run it. One it isn't safe, two we don't have the infrastructure for that (no installshield) stuff and third a random download won't automatically get updated so you open yourself up to exploits. What you should do is click on a link that adds a REPO. You do have to inform the user they have to take one additional step and go add your program using the package manager, but then everything "Just Works(tm)" even better than your Mac or what a Windows user gets. Your app gets the advantages of package management. It doesn't have to statically link every library, it can depend on the system copies, safe in the knowledge that any missing ones will get automatically installed. That is why we didn't just ape the bad habits of Win/Mac, we did something better.
If you want to see just how seamless it can be, look at how Adobe has done it with Adobe Reader and Flash Player. Updates for both appear mixed in with the rest of the torrent of updates on my Fedora install.
Instead of putting links to stand alone packages or installers on your site when you release a Linux version you put links to repos for the distributions you intend to support. In those repos you place packages for the distro versions and arches you support and when you release an update you plop them into the repo and watch all of your users update over the next couple of days. You don't have to add an update notification feature into every fracking app, ain't it wonderful to just leverage the operating system's existing feature?
Or you can go with a more statically linked.i386 version stuffed into a more generic.deb and.rpm and cover most yum and apt enabled distributions at a small loss of performance and odd arches. Whatever floats yer boat.
> Politicians should not be getting money directly from the public, period.
So we either get government financed elections, i.e. the politicians voting themselves taxpayer money (taxes money extracted by force) for their own use, or we have a world where only the idle rich can hold public office. Either way the 1st Amendment goes in the trashcan in your perverted world. Screw that. Listen up hippie, cash == speech, outlaw one you outlaw both. Don't like that? Tough, reality isn't required to conform to your Marxist professor's zany notions. Or you can explain how outlawing one doesn't end up outlawing the other?
> It's a conflict of interest with the ideals of democracy (1 person = 1 vote, but 1 vote + money > 1 vote).
Well lets start your political education with informing you we are not and were never intended to be a Democracy. Calling a Founding Father a Democrat would have required him to punch you in the face for such a dreadful insult.
But anyway.... In theory you have a point, rich people can afford a bigger megaphone. In reality it isn't as bad as you probably think it is. Look at NJ where the rich guy used his own checkbook to outspend the guy who ended up winning by over 3-1. Ok, when you get to Mayor Bloomberg's level of throwing money at an election it made a difference but again, just how do you propose to stop it? They guy is a media baron after all, so how do you plan on shutting him up? Even if you somehow stopped him buying ads on other outlets, just his own media empire sucking up to the boss would be a heck of an advantage. Or do you plan to ban private ownership of media also? See what I meant earlier about your road leading to a repeal of the 1st Amendment when it gets in the way?
And remember, while one rich guy can throw his money around, we small people have numbers on our side and the best way to leverage that is through a PAC. When a couple million or so folks send in a check to the NRA[1] it becomes a force every politician ignores at their peril. Because beyond the money they can wield as a weapon they have something a billionaire doesn't have, a couple million registered voters standing behind the money.
And on the gripping hand perhaps it isn't a problem with money buying a bigger voice in modern society anyway since so much of government's plans these days is seizing that money from the rich, who are few in actual votes, with the intention of 'spreading it around' to the masses of voters. More bluntly, buying people's votes with other people's money. One could make a good argument for self defense.
[1] If you don't approve of the 2nd Amendment substitute another civil rights organization, enviro group, etc.
> a more accurate term for "private funding of campaigns" is "buying votes of congresscritters".
The two do not actually have to be connected. All we really need is good disclosure laws.
And then we need to forbid laundering contributions through fronts. I.e. people can give to a PAC which gives to candidates. But one incorporated entity should not be allowed to give money to another organization that contributes more than a trivial (under 10% of budget) to political activity. That would stop the Soros' empire of incest where nobody can figure out what money ended up where between Tides, ACORN, WFP, SEIU, Free Press, CAP, etc. all passing sacks of cash around until they blur out the original contributor and then funneling it to candidates or into the GOTV effort on election day.
You, like most progressives, believe (when it isn't YOUR guys doing it) that all campaign contributions are evidence of corruption. Not true. There are two reasons to give money to a political organization or politician.
Reason one is because you agree with their position. If I agree with a politician and give him money to help him fight the good fight that isn't corrupting. That doesn't change if I'm the CEO of Exxon.
The other reason is when you pay a politician to agree with you. That one is wrong. Of course it can be pretty hard to prove which came first, the agreement or the sack 'o cash.
Which is why it is best to simply ignore the issue with full disclosure. Because then it really doesn't matter which comes first. Remember that while money is important, votes are what matter. If most of the people who vote for a candidate know they are taking sacks of cash from Exxon, the NRA, George Soros, SEIU, whatever and vote for them then they are also cool with the alliance.
Close enough. If you live in a Comcast area you probably have at most two viable choices for broadband.
Option 1: The government controlled monopoly telco. Government sets the rates, availibility and specifies reliability requirements. Government grants your RBOC an absolute monopoly on the right to string phone wires. Muddied recently by the cable co's new ability to offer dialtone.
Option 2: The government controlled monopoly cable co. Government grants regional monopolies on running CATV wires, sets rates, etc. If they were government owned outright the service wouldn't be much worse.
And in 90% of the country you have those two choices and no others. Broadband by wireless (ground or geosync) is only viable for people who can't get one of the others. Slow, laggy and heavily capped sum up all wireless offerings.
All you guys whinging about the invasive effects of government with network neutrality missed the boat, it sailed already. If you want to fix the problem, get to the root cause. Break the monopolies one more time, but this time break them along the natural faultline. Two government regulated utilities that owns the physical plant (the building, head end or switch and the wires, poles, boxes, etc) and two more unregulated companies that supplies dialtone, IP or TV programming by buying carriage rights from the monopolies on a 100% non-discriminatory basis with anyone else who wants to compete.
> How would government financing of media be anything but state-run media?
It would quickly be even worse. How often do the 'serious journalist' talking heads bemoan the corporate influence in politics and then offer up public financing of campaigns as the solution? So you will quickly have government sponsered/licensed 'journalists' reporting the official government line. And if you don't like the government line you will have two choices, suckle the government teat and run for office with their official rules for what, when and where you can speak or you can go into the media and if they deign to license you, you will be permitted to speak what you are told when you are told. In short the government will be a power unto itself, essentially picking its own members and criticism of the government will itself be a government function. Needless to say that 'criticism' will in fact be cheerleading of the MSNBC sort. I have a suggestion! The first government subsidized newspaper can be renamed to News and the next one can be Truth.
Don't think these are unrelated issues. This government is hellbent on suppressing all dissent like no other administration since Wilson or FDR.
> Well, obviously that's a given, but I'm talking about being capable of > competing against alternative sources of energy on the open market.
Because unity gain in a fusion reaction is a fricking holy grail of the alternative energy scene. If they manage to build a reactor that can keep running more than a second or two and actually produce enough power out the steam turbines to actually run the darned thing with ANYTHING left over to push out onto the grid we will have won the battle for energy independence. Game Over.
Because the energy to run the fusion reaction itself is huge and it would be expected that fine tuning and minor refinements can get at least single digit efficiency improvements, even if the initial installation is puny we should quickly be able to get huge outputs sufficient to make all other electrical generation methods obsolete. And TFA is talking about 10-1 out vs in. Yes that is probably pie in the sky but DAMN! To go from less than 1-1 to 10-1 would be awesome.
Get fusion working and you can forget your gay little solar panels, your windmills, your biofuels, all that crap is yesterday's news. With virtually limitless electrical power we can either solve the battery problem for mobile energy or make a sustainable fuel. Hydrogen would be good if we can solve the storage problem or just synthesize some appropriate hydrocarbon that we can dump into our existing gas tanks. If we are making the gas from scratch instead of burning dead dinosaurs the whole loop can be carbon neutral and shut the warmers up. Bonus!
> One factor is how much you read. If you read too much, you don't get mod points.
Nah, that isn't the secret. I read almost every day (you have a higher achievement for days read in a row, but only by one) and I get mod points fairly regular. Almost never get an option to metamod though. Slashdot's system is truly inscrutable and capricious yet somehow it seems to work.
> The naming of that edition is ironic, since students can now get Office 2007 Ultimate edition for $59.95.
Important differences. Home and Student Edition is just a name for branding purposes, anybody can use it. And if you buy it at retail you can legally install it on up to three machines. The EDU version you link to is an academic edition, notice the "valid.edu email address required" part. Looks like they have dropped the restrictions on use that used to be common to academic licensing though. Oh and you do have to pay another $13 if you need the install media.
> What about the investigative journalism that revealed the existence of the so-called > "torture memos", or the secret CIA prisons, or the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program,
What about them? You are laboring under the mistaken notion any of those required a lot of work. All of those were the result of one whistleblower/traitor (depending on your viewpoint, but that question is offtopic for this discussion) doing a document dump on a friendly reporter. In a world without a legacy media they would have dumped on one of the new media outlets. In those cases you mention wikileaks, dailykos, huffingtonpost, etc. would have been able to ignite enough publicity to get the job done.
> > Thought experiment.
> [citation needed]?
No. First this isn't wikipedia. Second the point was for YOU to start noticing how bad the media is by paying attention to how often they get facts in reporting where you know enough about the subject to spot the problems. Any example cited would devolve into a discussion about that particular example and miss the point.
> But this reasoning essentially boils down to the statement that newspapers don't have a perfect > record of accuracy and, therefore, they must be totally inaccurate. Clearly that's fallacious reasoning.
And had I made that argument you would have a point. But I didn't so you don't. The legacy media make the claim they have serious resources to devote to producing a professional product that is accurate and in depth. But by allowing the sort of obvious and trivial errors to make it into print that one can find in almost any published story these days it casts serious doubt that ANYONE other than the original writer ever seriously read the piece prior to publication. If multiple fact checkers, editors, etc. were actually involved in the production process one of them would have noticed and fixed the obvious typos.
In days of yore, before computers, a typo making it into print in a first rate newspaper was a fairly rare event. Grizzled editors wielded their red pen like a crazed English teacher. if you wanted to know how to write perfect English you could read the New York Times, what appeared on those pages WAS the 'official' definition of the current state of the language and it really was "All the news that was fit to print." Not anymore.
And if reporters are, as I suspect in the majority of cases, simply uploading stories straight into a content management system from where they get dumped almost unseen, certainly not carefully read, onto the web and print edition then exactly how is this different from a blogger? Because the reporter is wearing pants instead of pajamas? And who is verifying the reporter is really wearing pants? Bet Jason Blair wasn't. And that clown got away with inventing stories for years at the highest levels of journalism. How many more such scandals are waiting?
> Besides which, I'd imagine that most spell-checking is relegated to a computer program.
And that nobody in the production chain even bothers to hit the spell check/grammar check button speaks volumes. I'm only posting to slashdot but I usually notice the red underline and fix most of the bad typos.
Uh huh. Sounds like you are still stuck in the legacy media's world.
> Then when no WMDs were found they buried it on page 7
What planet do you live on? The legacy media harped on that fiction daily... at least until The Won replaced BusHitler. The facts differ. You have to google hard for em but they are there. We did indeed, quietly. ship a shipload of uranium out of Iraq. It made barely a ripple in the news when it was finally made public months later.
And despite the reimagining of history in the popular version, Joseph Wilson's misbegotten adventure provided direct confirmation that Saddam had tried and failed to purchase yellowcake in Niger. Which, if you could be troubled to read the actual quote.... Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush didn't say they succeeded, only that they had made the attempt, which is exactly what Wilson reported. And since the British government did indeed say it, Bush was also 100% correct in quoting it. Yet the popular version of history, the one created by the legacy media, is that Bush somehow lied. If anyone can explain how that is even possible in the context of 'the sixteen words' I'd be happy to be enlightened.
You would also have to be ignorant of and/or willfully ignore the fairly credible statements of a former Iraq Army general who swears he oversaw a planeload of WMD moved to Syria in the days before the invasion.
> Many Americans still believe there were WMDs and connections between Sadam and Al Q.
Perhaps that is because there WERE actually WMD in Iraq? And when every intelligence agency on the planet was in perfect agreement on the presence of WMD in Iraq it really is rather unfair for you idjits to go on and on about Bush and Darth Cheney cooking up some sort of conspiracy over the matter.
And as for Saddam and Al Qaeda, yes there are plenty of links. No there isn't the slightest smidgen of evidence to implicate Saddam in the 9/11 attack but there is abundant evidence of a working relation between UBL and Saddam. We have direct video evidence of Saddam proudly supporting terrorism in general. He was flagrently and notoriously harboring several name brand international terrorists, making payments to the families of suicide bombers, etc. And please remember it was the Global War on Terror, not the war on AQ. After 9/11 it became US policy that anyone who thought terrorism (defined as random attacks on non-military targets and/or deliberate killing of civilians) was a valid tactic was going to get snuffed.
You are of course entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. I too have one and it fairly obviously shows in this post in places. So please try to dispute the FACTS in this post because unless you can do that, while you can have your opinion it will be but a silly thing based upon fantasy.
> The problem is, newspapers isn't being replaced by anything superior.
No you, like almost everyone in the legacy media, miss the root of the problem. The overhead of dead tree distribution is a problem for newspapers. But it isn't THE problem. Otherwise the other parts of the legacy media such as the big three network newscasts wouldn't be suffering the same decline. Hollywood is having trouble selling both movie tickets and DVDs, the music industry is declining. Network television has been in decline for decades. The Internet isn't the problem. It's the content, stupid!
People are dropping newspaper subscriptions because there is nothing in them anymore that can't be read online. If you think there is journalism in a newspaper these days it is because you haven't picked one up lately and actually read it. It's all opinion posing as news, press releases reprinted as gospel, rumors and gossip and what doesn't fit into one of above categories it is probably inaccurate anyway. And that damnation is even before bringing up the political bias that has become so blatant the blind can now see it. But even worse than the lies, distortions and faked news is what they leave out of the news because it doesn't fit their prefab storylines
Thought experiment. Most reading here are tech types. Read a legacy media story about a tech issue and note how many inacuracies you can spot. It isn't just tech, it is your ability to spot errors in that field that is greater. The error rate in every other section is as great or greater. If you asked a doctor about medical coverage he would give you just as many horror stories. Mass media always had the problem of trying to dumb down stories for a mass audience, but years of budget slashing and general decline in overall education means it is now semi-literate reporters reporting for morons.
Now go read a couple stories from a major source, say the NYT or CNN. Note how many basic grammar errors you find, assuming you yourself are clueful enough to do this. They SAY the reason to trust the MSM over bloggers in their underwear is they have vetting, fact checking and editors. Jason Blair puts paid to vetting, the test above should remove all doubt as to fact checking and if there are still real editors in the newsroom how do so many basic spelling and grammar errors make it into print? If they aren't even bothering to proofread the damned copy are we to believe they are calling back all the sources and checking the quotes and going to authoritative sources to confirm every fact and figure in a story? And unlike most bloggers, they don't even bother running a correction unless someone important makes a fuss or threatens legal action.
And it isn't the Internet or piracy that is killing Hollywood, it is the fact that have been pumping out crap for years.
> What, you think it's just cryptography that makes Blu-Ray hard to play?
Yes. The actual video work is done with dedicated hardware, same as with DVD. And hardware to decode BD class video is pretty cheap and low power these days. A $30-$40 addon card for netbooks is already being marketed to allow the Puny Atom+shared memory video to play 1080p content. No, the fan is there for the general purpose CPU they use for the bull crap. They can't reduce the crypto to hardware because they can't stop tinkering with it in the ever futile war with the cracking gangs.
> How this is possible? I don't understand the whole rental world.
No, you don't. So I'll explain it in a nutshell. Remember when BlockBuster started their new releases always in stock campaign? That was when everything changed. Before rental stores could just buy em off the rack and rent them. But there was no way to buy enough copies to sustain that first two weeks when a new release came out and make a profit that way. Meanwhile Hollywood HATED rental, they made one lousy sale and BlockBuster got to keep renting it until it was too scratched to play anymore.
So a deal was made. Blockbuster got as many copies as they wanted really cheap but Hollywood gets a taste of the rental revenue stream. Everyone else then made similar deals or went out of business since they couldn't compete anymore. New releases are where the action is.
Btw, VHS rental had a different solution. Hollywood developed the 'self destructing videotape' which could only play a couple dozen times and shifted retail sales to them as they dropped the prices to $20-$30 instead of the original $80+ Videotapes started at. Of course they offered the rental chains the original tape formulation at the original high prices. So rental shops would buy a couple of them plus a bunch of the short lifespan copies to handle the initial surge. As demand dropped they would unload the crappy ones on the 'previewed' shelf before they were totally useless.
> Never will it be the fact that buying it on blu-ray allows me to play it on only one device > in my house when I have many more capable of playing movies.
Which wouldn't be a problem if blu-ray was as cracked as DVD, drop it down to DVD for the kids room, the portable DVD players, the car, etc. But no they had to put hard ass crypto on it so bad the players required huge processors just to do the crypto and of course for the JAVA bullcrap. Most BD players have frickin' cooling fans!
I won't be buying BD until it plays on VLC or Mplayer. Because if either of those can play it, extracting the movie is straightforward.
> Why don't you just go down to the Apple store and ask to shown around. > It's what all those macs are sitting there for.
1. Using Mapquest's estimate, the closest Apple store is 2:56 away.
2. A half hour playing with a demo unit isn't likely to be very helpful. Especially compared to a few hours with a VM.
3. Even if I didn't like OS X enough to want to drink the Kool-Aid, a VM version would, as others pointed out, allow an occasional use to test compatibility. That would be enough to spend $130 on, but not $600 plus a KVM and all that other crap to support a whole physical PC.
> You can run a virtual Mac in qemu using the "-M mac" option.
I have heard this before. Is this an out of tree patchset? On Fedora 11 I get this:
$ qemu -M help Supported machines are: pc Standard PC (default) isapc ISA-only PC
I'd love to explore OS X a bit, but the price tag to get in the gate and look around is just to much unless you have already drank the Kool-Aid. The mini at $599 is sort of a joke and everything else goes over the 1K line.
> current "digital copy included!" DVDs on the market
I laugh every time I see that sticker on a DVD. Guys, don't ya know what the first D in DVD stands for? Or are you assuming we customers don't? Every DVD is a digital copy of the movie and the DRM is pretty broken these days. Yes a few of the newest titles introduce a new twist it takes a little while for the copy programs to catch up to but it isn't a serious problem. And if you just want a copy of the main feature mplayer is pretty much foolproof in being able to dump you a usable stream.
> Each time Linux redesigns some subsystem there are problems, and we see > the same people bitching about how we should use $ALTERNATIVE instead...
No, the situation with Pulse is different in several ways.
1. With previous changes there was pain in the transition but even those suffering most could see that the change was going to be a good thing. Not so with Pulse. Pulseaudio is a system that would be, at best, a minor improvement in a perfect world and a never ending nightmare in the real one. Harsh charge? Read on.
2. Pulse blameshifts all it's problems to apps and drivers. Ok, apps (open source ones anyway) will eventually get fixed. Drivers won't. Motherboards do not ship with sound drivers for Linux. Linux ships generic drivers for the sound chips on popular systems. There is a big difference. Board makers connect those generic chips in a myriad of ways, poorly documented if at all outside the Windows driver. Manual intervention and exploration is usually required to figure out what is connected to what and how best to configure things. Pulse's design is to remove all controls except one big volume slider.
Examples: My desktop system requires careful balancing of the VIA DXS, PCM and Master sliders to get enough output to drive my speakers and avoid clipping in the digital side of the system. My Thinkpad needs an easy way to mute the master output to silence the internal speaker while leaving the external output alone to get good results while docked. Feel free to add your story, if enough of us provide use cases where ONE slider won't work.... they will ignore all of us.:(
3. It still isn't even clear exactly what problem Pulse is supposed to be a solution to. Every major application had finally achieved stable ALSA support, and ALSA works. Being able to move sound streams between devices while they play is gee whiz and all, but it isn't a problem most of us are needing enough to endure a lot of pain to get. It might be worth the pain if we were being promised this would be THE audio solution but the Pulse devs themselves admit it isn't, Pulse can't touch JACKs realtime features.
4. But the biggest problem with Pulse is the devs. There are real problems but this time, unlike past transitions, this isn't a case of they haven't fixed all the bugs yet, it isn't even a case where they tell ya to submit a damned patch if ya want your problem fixed NOW. Both of those cases are normal examples of Free Software development. No, what is new is bugs being closed with "That problem can't exist within our philosophy and thus can't be fixed, buy new hardware and hope it works." In other words, that problem can't be fixed without exposing complexity we don't believe should exist. They have forgotten the second half of "Make things as simple as possible, but no more."
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> Another way to think about it - you are now vulnerable to local root exploits not only
> in packages you installed, but also in packages you chose not to install.
DING! You nailed it. The attack surface has been expanded to include every package in every enabled repo. Find a local root exploit in any one of them and you get the machine.
This is totally stupid. It makes the assumption that every user is an admin, which was exactly the idiocy we have, rightly, laughed at Microsoft for years over. Microsoft has been working at correcting that mistake while we have been adopting it. And it isn't just Fedora, this apparently came from upstream at PackgeKit so unless this gets nipped in the bud it will spread to everyone else.
The root of the problem is that decisions that impact security are being made by marketing people more concerned with the 'year of the Linux desktop'. And again, wasn't this exactly what we slagged Microsoft over in the past? As Linux nears readiness for mass consumption we find ourselves making exactly the same mistakes for exactly the same reasons. We are tossing decades of hard won security knowledge onto the altar of user friendliness.
We didn't learn anything. We are doomed.
> Check IBM and other hardware vendors for PPC and Power CPUs.
And how many people are going to run Fedora on a stack of blades? The only reason Fedora PPC still exists is because RH sells enough RHEL to those customers to justify it.
> Do you know what CPU is in the Wii and XBox360?
Do you know that Fedora doesn't run on either of those platforms? And even if you could break the hardware DRM, the lack of drivers, etc. and shovel it on the hardware, the resources suck on both. The Wii is pitiful and the Xbox is underendowed enough in the ram dept that Fedora would be an unpleasant experience.
> Have you used Fedora recently?
F12 is downloading currently at home on my F11 desktop. I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X31 running F11. Fedora sucks. The other choices suck more, especially since I have invested over a decade in RH based distros and know how to work around their suckage more. Now get the hell off my lawn ya punk kid!
> It has come along ways since 1.0, and 2.0 where it required a lot of resources.
What the hell are you babbling about? FC1 and FC2 were slim petite distros compared to F11. Anaconda did have some serious bloat back around that time which pushed the minimum ram to install up beyond what you needed to actually use the machine after the install, but now you can't really use a machine that was current in the F1 timeframe without upgrading pretty much everything in the box.
> What you are saying is like, why do people care about Gnu/Linux, when there is OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.
No. What I am saying is that until we decide to stop trying to chase Apple and Microsoft's taillights and instead try to make Linux the best *NIX in the world we are doomed to bloat. If you don't like that and want to actually use older hardware you currently have no choice other than to use an unbloated traditional UNIX such as NetBSD or OpenBSD.
The comment about Solaris should have been simple enough to understand. Seriously, how many people are buying current SPARC64 hardware to run anything but Solaris on? And because the number buying SPARC hardware has been pitiful for years there isn't much old stuff to repurpose anymore until you go back to truly ancient gear.
Dude, PPC is dead so get over it. The PS3/Cell was the last hardware you could actually buy and it dropped support for Linux in the latest hardware rev. And the previous support was crippled to the point of pointlessness.
SPARC is long in the grave. SPARC64 is still around but again, nobody actually has anything other than old ancient stuff that isn't going to have the resources for a pig[1] like Fedora. Excepting a few peeps buying new hardware, but they are going to run Solaris on new gear. Old zombie platforms is what NetBSD is for.
Itanium? Yes HP is still making a half-hearted effort to move units but really. Nice try but it too has failed in the marketplace.
These days the action is in small. ARM and MIPS are what we should be looking for in ports these days.
[1] No a slam, if you track current desktops, OO.o, FF, etc. the result is going to oink.
> Helping people is at best a secondary motive and sometimes not even not even a motive at all.
The UN actually does a good job doing what they were designed to do. It is just that most people were misled as to what they were designed to do. Look at how the UN was organized, one nation state, one vote in a world where most were unfree hellholes. The UN is thus essentially a Parliment of Tyrants, by design. So look at it's output and you will see it is actualy doing a good job of advancing the march of tyrany and human rights abuse.
Turning the Internet over to the UN must, as night follows day, lead to the advancement of the goals of tyrants. Anyone shocked by this simply wasn't paying attention.
You are of course making one fatal assumption, that a EULA is worth the paper it is printed on. And more importantly, that they should be. If they are both legal and moral we are boned. Is saving Apple's broken business model worth giving up the fight against EULAs over?
If stuff in boxes apparently sold in stores is in fact only licensed it is game over for freedom. It really is just that simple. If what looks like a sale isn't when Apple does it, it isn't a sale when Walmart sells you a DVD either. So in your world it isn't just illegal when I watch one on my Linux PC or when you shift one to your iPod, it is immoral.
Think I'm exagerating? How? The make the exact same argument, that the DVD you think you bought was only licensed to you. That you agree that you will only use that DVD with DVD-CCA licensed players in exactly the same way Apple insists you may only use their DVD on an Apple licensed 'player'.
Exactly the same arguments apply regarding the DMCA. If you want to live in a world where that horror is not only the law but morally defensible then again, it is game over.
Note that in none of the arguments I make here is it required to believe copyright is wrong. The idea of copyright is in no way impaired if I play a DVD on my PC, you stuff one on your iPod or when somebody buys a copy of OS X and puts it on the machine of their choice. Same when Pystar sells you a Mac clone, so long as they buy a copy of OS X with each one and that copy goes out the door with the machine.
In any other case the slashdot crowd would be raging and the megacorp who crushed the small upstart's website would be hacked, but wouldn't be visible because of the simultanious DDoS attack. Only because the megacorp is Apple and the rules with them are somehow different.
Seriously. Find me another case where Slashdot cheers a EULA being upheld. Find me another case where a DMCA attack is applauded. Listen up ya numbbuts, EULAs are always evil. The DMCA is always evil. Even when Steve Jobs is crushing a small competitor. What Pystar was doing may be illegal (I'd argue that point though) but I double dog dare any fanboy to stand up here and defend the MORAL position Apple took.
Either what Apple sells in those boxes are full copies of OS X or they are upgrades. Apple insists they are full copies when it suits their arguments AND equally insists they are mere upgrades when they need to crush Pystar. Make up yer fracking minds.
> Linux means freedom and liberty to many.
Indeed. Fork.
Most of the calls to do dumb things like this comes from people who don't have a clue though and after all the yelling they eventually shut up. The notable thing about this one was this guy actually produced code. But just because somebody writes some code to do something bad doesn't mean it has to go in. Lots of code never completes the process of getting merged.
And just look how screwed the Free Software movement would have been had we listened to the loudmouthed know nothings over the years.
We would be suffering from:
1. A registry... and like Microsoft trying to find a way out of that swamp. Oh you are probably too young but I remember the frequent, loud and certain they were right Microsoft taillight chasers back in the late 1990's who insisted that if we didn't move everything into a binary registry we would be doomed to fall behind the times and be forgotten.
2. We would have dumped X. Scads of people who don't even understand the difference between GNOME/KDE and X still pontificate here on /. about the need to dump X for a 'modern' (read Microsoft clone that can run DirectX games perfectly) design on almost a monthly rate.
3. Linux would be using shims to run with Windows device drivers, because 'everyone knows' Linux will never have enough device driver support for "The Year of the Linux Desktop" to come about. Funny how we now have deeper driver support than Vista/Win7.
4. Or Linux would have a fixed driver API, again because we could 'never' get sufficient driver support with only Free drivers and vendors need a fixed driver ABI to code their closed horrid crap against.
Fat binaries are a solution to a problem we don't have. Distros had a problem Apple & Microsoft didn't, how to deal with thousands of components in a sane way. In solving that they evolved modern package manager and repo technology to the point where it works so much better than the stand alone installer there is no point supporting that broken model. And once you accept the logic of a repo and a package manager the need for fat binaries vanishes.
One advance in package management I would like to see is user local package installation. Obviously it wouldn't work for packages that need enhanced rights but it would be good for most end user apps and would allow users on a multiuser system to add software into their home directory without needing an admin.
> The advantage is on the typical user side. As a Mac user over two architecture
> transitions, I've really appreciated just being able to pull down a single executable
> from a site and have it "just work".
Here is a hint. Don't come from a Mac to UNIX and expect things to work like you expect. Same for those coming from Windows. Things are different here. That is the point, Mac/Windows/UNIX/Linux have different philosophies and assumptions, not just some minor variation in widgets and file naming conventions.
We use package managers here. You aren't supposed to download an executable from some webpage and run it. One it isn't safe, two we don't have the infrastructure for that (no installshield) stuff and third a random download won't automatically get updated so you open yourself up to exploits. What you should do is click on a link that adds a REPO. You do have to inform the user they have to take one additional step and go add your program using the package manager, but then everything "Just Works(tm)" even better than your Mac or what a Windows user gets. Your app gets the advantages of package management. It doesn't have to statically link every library, it can depend on the system copies, safe in the knowledge that any missing ones will get automatically installed. That is why we didn't just ape the bad habits of Win/Mac, we did something better.
If you want to see just how seamless it can be, look at how Adobe has done it with Adobe Reader and Flash Player. Updates for both appear mixed in with the rest of the torrent of updates on my Fedora install.
Instead of putting links to stand alone packages or installers on your site when you release a Linux version you put links to repos for the distributions you intend to support. In those repos you place packages for the distro versions and arches you support and when you release an update you plop them into the repo and watch all of your users update over the next couple of days. You don't have to add an update notification feature into every fracking app, ain't it wonderful to just leverage the operating system's existing feature?
Or you can go with a more statically linked .i386 version stuffed into a more generic .deb and .rpm and cover most yum and apt enabled distributions at a small loss of performance and odd arches. Whatever floats yer boat.
> Politicians should not be getting money directly from the public, period.
So we either get government financed elections, i.e. the politicians voting themselves taxpayer money (taxes money extracted by force) for their own use, or we have a world where only the idle rich can hold public office. Either way the 1st Amendment goes in the trashcan in your perverted world. Screw that. Listen up hippie, cash == speech, outlaw one you outlaw both. Don't like that? Tough, reality isn't required to conform to your Marxist professor's zany notions. Or you can explain how outlawing one doesn't end up outlawing the other?
> It's a conflict of interest with the ideals of democracy (1 person = 1 vote, but 1 vote + money > 1 vote).
Well lets start your political education with informing you we are not and were never intended to be a Democracy. Calling a Founding Father a Democrat would have required him to punch you in the face for such a dreadful insult.
But anyway.... In theory you have a point, rich people can afford a bigger megaphone. In reality it isn't as bad as you probably think it is. Look at NJ where the rich guy used his own checkbook to outspend the guy who ended up winning by over 3-1. Ok, when you get to Mayor Bloomberg's level of throwing money at an election it made a difference but again, just how do you propose to stop it? They guy is a media baron after all, so how do you plan on shutting him up? Even if you somehow stopped him buying ads on other outlets, just his own media empire sucking up to the boss would be a heck of an advantage. Or do you plan to ban private ownership of media also? See what I meant earlier about your road leading to a repeal of the 1st Amendment when it gets in the way?
And remember, while one rich guy can throw his money around, we small people have numbers on our side and the best way to leverage that is through a PAC. When a couple million or so folks send in a check to the NRA[1] it becomes a force every politician ignores at their peril. Because beyond the money they can wield as a weapon they have something a billionaire doesn't have, a couple million registered voters standing behind the money.
And on the gripping hand perhaps it isn't a problem with money buying a bigger voice in modern society anyway since so much of government's plans these days is seizing that money from the rich, who are few in actual votes, with the intention of 'spreading it around' to the masses of voters. More bluntly, buying people's votes with other people's money. One could make a good argument for self defense.
[1] If you don't approve of the 2nd Amendment substitute another civil rights organization, enviro group, etc.
> a more accurate term for "private funding of campaigns" is "buying votes of congresscritters".
The two do not actually have to be connected. All we really need is good disclosure laws.
And then we need to forbid laundering contributions through fronts. I.e. people can give to a PAC which gives to candidates. But one incorporated entity should not be allowed to give money to another organization that contributes more than a trivial (under 10% of budget) to political activity. That would stop the Soros' empire of incest where nobody can figure out what money ended up where between Tides, ACORN, WFP, SEIU, Free Press, CAP, etc. all passing sacks of cash around until they blur out the original contributor and then funneling it to candidates or into the GOTV effort on election day.
You, like most progressives, believe (when it isn't YOUR guys doing it) that all campaign contributions are evidence of corruption. Not true. There are two reasons to give money to a political organization or politician.
Reason one is because you agree with their position. If I agree with a politician and give him money to help him fight the good fight that isn't corrupting. That doesn't change if I'm the CEO of Exxon.
The other reason is when you pay a politician to agree with you. That one is wrong. Of course it can be pretty hard to prove which came first, the agreement or the sack 'o cash.
Which is why it is best to simply ignore the issue with full disclosure. Because then it really doesn't matter which comes first. Remember that while money is important, votes are what matter. If most of the people who vote for a candidate know they are taking sacks of cash from Exxon, the NRA, George Soros, SEIU, whatever and vote for them then they are also cool with the alliance.
> Comcast is not a monopoly.
Close enough. If you live in a Comcast area you probably have at most two viable choices for broadband.
Option 1: The government controlled monopoly telco. Government sets the rates, availibility and specifies reliability requirements. Government grants your RBOC an absolute monopoly on the right to string phone wires. Muddied recently by the cable co's new ability to offer dialtone.
Option 2: The government controlled monopoly cable co. Government grants regional monopolies on running CATV wires, sets rates, etc. If they were government owned outright the service wouldn't be much worse.
And in 90% of the country you have those two choices and no others. Broadband by wireless (ground or geosync) is only viable for people who can't get one of the others. Slow, laggy and heavily capped sum up all wireless offerings.
All you guys whinging about the invasive effects of government with network neutrality missed the boat, it sailed already. If you want to fix the problem, get to the root cause. Break the monopolies one more time, but this time break them along the natural faultline. Two government regulated utilities that owns the physical plant (the building, head end or switch and the wires, poles, boxes, etc) and two more unregulated companies that supplies dialtone, IP or TV programming by buying carriage rights from the monopolies on a 100% non-discriminatory basis with anyone else who wants to compete.
> How would government financing of media be anything but state-run media?
It would quickly be even worse. How often do the 'serious journalist' talking heads bemoan the corporate influence in politics and then offer up public financing of campaigns as the solution? So you will quickly have government sponsered/licensed 'journalists' reporting the official government line. And if you don't like the government line you will have two choices, suckle the government teat and run for office with their official rules for what, when and where you can speak or you can go into the media and if they deign to license you, you will be permitted to speak what you are told when you are told. In short the government will be a power unto itself, essentially picking its own members and criticism of the government will itself be a government function. Needless to say that 'criticism' will in fact be cheerleading of the MSNBC sort. I have a suggestion! The first government subsidized newspaper can be renamed to News and the next one can be Truth.
Don't think these are unrelated issues. This government is hellbent on suppressing all dissent like no other administration since Wilson or FDR.
> Well, obviously that's a given, but I'm talking about being capable of
> competing against alternative sources of energy on the open market.
Because unity gain in a fusion reaction is a fricking holy grail of the alternative energy scene. If they manage to build a reactor that can keep running more than a second or two and actually produce enough power out the steam turbines to actually run the darned thing with ANYTHING left over to push out onto the grid we will have won the battle for energy independence. Game Over.
Because the energy to run the fusion reaction itself is huge and it would be expected that fine tuning and minor refinements can get at least single digit efficiency improvements, even if the initial installation is puny we should quickly be able to get huge outputs sufficient to make all other electrical generation methods obsolete. And TFA is talking about 10-1 out vs in. Yes that is probably pie in the sky but DAMN! To go from less than 1-1 to 10-1 would be awesome.
Get fusion working and you can forget your gay little solar panels, your windmills, your biofuels, all that crap is yesterday's news. With virtually limitless electrical power we can either solve the battery problem for mobile energy or make a sustainable fuel. Hydrogen would be good if we can solve the storage problem or just synthesize some appropriate hydrocarbon that we can dump into our existing gas tanks. If we are making the gas from scratch instead of burning dead dinosaurs the whole loop can be carbon neutral and shut the warmers up. Bonus!
> One factor is how much you read. If you read too much, you don't get mod points.
Nah, that isn't the secret. I read almost every day (you have a higher achievement for days read in a row, but only by one) and I get mod points fairly regular. Almost never get an option to metamod though. Slashdot's system is truly inscrutable and capricious yet somehow it seems to work.
> The naming of that edition is ironic, since students can now get Office 2007 Ultimate edition for $59.95.
Important differences. Home and Student Edition is just a name for branding purposes, anybody can use it. And if you buy it at retail you can legally install it on up to three machines. The EDU version you link to is an academic edition, notice the "valid .edu email address required" part. Looks like they have dropped the restrictions on use that used to be common to academic licensing though. Oh and you do have to pay another $13 if you need the install media.
> What about the investigative journalism that revealed the existence of the so-called
> "torture memos", or the secret CIA prisons, or the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program,
What about them? You are laboring under the mistaken notion any of those required a lot of work. All of those were the result of one whistleblower/traitor (depending on your viewpoint, but that question is offtopic for this discussion) doing a document dump on a friendly reporter. In a world without a legacy media they would have dumped on one of the new media outlets. In those cases you mention wikileaks, dailykos, huffingtonpost, etc. would have been able to ignite enough publicity to get the job done.
> > Thought experiment.
> [citation needed]?
No. First this isn't wikipedia. Second the point was for YOU to start noticing how bad the media is by paying attention to how often they get facts in reporting where you know enough about the subject to spot the problems. Any example cited would devolve into a discussion about that particular example and miss the point.
> But this reasoning essentially boils down to the statement that newspapers don't have a perfect
> record of accuracy and, therefore, they must be totally inaccurate. Clearly that's fallacious reasoning.
And had I made that argument you would have a point. But I didn't so you don't. The legacy media make the claim they have serious resources to devote to producing a professional product that is accurate and in depth. But by allowing the sort of obvious and trivial errors to make it into print that one can find in almost any published story these days it casts serious doubt that ANYONE other than the original writer ever seriously read the piece prior to publication. If multiple fact checkers, editors, etc. were actually involved in the production process one of them would have noticed and fixed the obvious typos.
In days of yore, before computers, a typo making it into print in a first rate newspaper was a fairly rare event. Grizzled editors wielded their red pen like a crazed English teacher. if you wanted to know how to write perfect English you could read the New York Times, what appeared on those pages WAS the 'official' definition of the current state of the language and it really was "All the news that was fit to print." Not anymore.
And if reporters are, as I suspect in the majority of cases, simply uploading stories straight into a content management system from where they get dumped almost unseen, certainly not carefully read, onto the web and print edition then exactly how is this different from a blogger? Because the reporter is wearing pants instead of pajamas? And who is verifying the reporter is really wearing pants? Bet Jason Blair wasn't. And that clown got away with inventing stories for years at the highest levels of journalism. How many more such scandals are waiting?
> Besides which, I'd imagine that most spell-checking is relegated to a computer program.
And that nobody in the production chain even bothers to hit the spell check/grammar check button speaks volumes. I'm only posting to slashdot but I usually notice the red underline and fix most of the bad typos.
> Case in point...
Uh huh. Sounds like you are still stuck in the legacy media's world.
> Then when no WMDs were found they buried it on page 7
What planet do you live on? The legacy media harped on that fiction daily... at least until The Won replaced BusHitler. The facts differ. You have to google hard for em but they are there. We did indeed, quietly. ship a shipload of uranium out of Iraq. It made barely a ripple in the news when it was finally made public months later.
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/06/world/fg-cake6
And despite the reimagining of history in the popular version, Joseph Wilson's misbegotten adventure provided direct confirmation that Saddam had tried and failed to purchase yellowcake in Niger. Which, if you could be troubled to read the actual quote.... Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Bush didn't say they succeeded, only that they had made the attempt, which is exactly what Wilson reported. And since the British government did indeed say it, Bush was also 100% correct in quoting it. Yet the popular version of history, the one created by the legacy media, is that Bush somehow lied. If anyone can explain how that is even possible in the context of 'the sixteen words' I'd be happy to be enlightened.
You would also have to be ignorant of and/or willfully ignore the fairly credible statements of a former Iraq Army general who swears he oversaw a planeload of WMD moved to Syria in the days before the invasion.
> Many Americans still believe there were WMDs and connections between Sadam and Al Q.
Perhaps that is because there WERE actually WMD in Iraq? And when every intelligence agency on the planet was in perfect agreement on the presence of WMD in Iraq it really is rather unfair for you idjits to go on and on about Bush and Darth Cheney cooking up some sort of conspiracy over the matter.
And as for Saddam and Al Qaeda, yes there are plenty of links. No there isn't the slightest smidgen of evidence to implicate Saddam in the 9/11 attack but there is abundant evidence of a working relation between UBL and Saddam. We have direct video evidence of Saddam proudly supporting terrorism in general. He was flagrently and notoriously harboring several name brand international terrorists, making payments to the families of suicide bombers, etc. And please remember it was the Global War on Terror, not the war on AQ. After 9/11 it became US policy that anyone who thought terrorism (defined as random attacks on non-military targets and/or deliberate killing of civilians) was a valid tactic was going to get snuffed.
You are of course entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. I too have one and it fairly obviously shows in this post in places. So please try to dispute the FACTS in this post because unless you can do that, while you can have your opinion it will be but a silly thing based upon fantasy.
> The problem is, newspapers isn't being replaced by anything superior.
No you, like almost everyone in the legacy media, miss the root of the problem. The overhead of dead tree distribution is a problem for newspapers. But it isn't THE problem. Otherwise the other parts of the legacy media such as the big three network newscasts wouldn't be suffering the same decline. Hollywood is having trouble selling both movie tickets and DVDs, the music industry is declining. Network television has been in decline for decades. The Internet isn't the problem. It's the content, stupid!
People are dropping newspaper subscriptions because there is nothing in them anymore that can't be read online. If you think there is journalism in a newspaper these days it is because you haven't picked one up lately and actually read it. It's all opinion posing as news, press releases reprinted as gospel, rumors and gossip and what doesn't fit into one of above categories it is probably inaccurate anyway. And that damnation is even before bringing up the political bias that has become so blatant the blind can now see it. But even worse than the lies, distortions and faked news is what they leave out of the news because it doesn't fit their prefab storylines
Thought experiment. Most reading here are tech types. Read a legacy media story about a tech issue and note how many inacuracies you can spot. It isn't just tech, it is your ability to spot errors in that field that is greater. The error rate in every other section is as great or greater. If you asked a doctor about medical coverage he would give you just as many horror stories. Mass media always had the problem of trying to dumb down stories for a mass audience, but years of budget slashing and general decline in overall education means it is now semi-literate reporters reporting for morons.
Now go read a couple stories from a major source, say the NYT or CNN. Note how many basic grammar errors you find, assuming you yourself are clueful enough to do this. They SAY the reason to trust the MSM over bloggers in their underwear is they have vetting, fact checking and editors. Jason Blair puts paid to vetting, the test above should remove all doubt as to fact checking and if there are still real editors in the newsroom how do so many basic spelling and grammar errors make it into print? If they aren't even bothering to proofread the damned copy are we to believe they are calling back all the sources and checking the quotes and going to authoritative sources to confirm every fact and figure in a story? And unlike most bloggers, they don't even bother running a correction unless someone important makes a fuss or threatens legal action.
And it isn't the Internet or piracy that is killing Hollywood, it is the fact that have been pumping out crap for years.
> What, you think it's just cryptography that makes Blu-Ray hard to play?
Yes. The actual video work is done with dedicated hardware, same as with DVD. And hardware to decode BD class video is pretty cheap and low power these days. A $30-$40 addon card for netbooks is already being marketed to allow the Puny Atom+shared memory video to play 1080p content. No, the fan is there for the general purpose CPU they use for the bull crap. They can't reduce the crypto to hardware because they can't stop tinkering with it in the ever futile war with the cracking gangs.
> How this is possible? I don't understand the whole rental world.
No, you don't. So I'll explain it in a nutshell. Remember when BlockBuster started their new releases always in stock campaign? That was when everything changed. Before rental stores could just buy em off the rack and rent them. But there was no way to buy enough copies to sustain that first two weeks when a new release came out and make a profit that way. Meanwhile Hollywood HATED rental, they made one lousy sale and BlockBuster got to keep renting it until it was too scratched to play anymore.
So a deal was made. Blockbuster got as many copies as they wanted really cheap but Hollywood gets a taste of the rental revenue stream. Everyone else then made similar deals or went out of business since they couldn't compete anymore. New releases are where the action is.
Btw, VHS rental had a different solution. Hollywood developed the 'self destructing videotape' which could only play a couple dozen times and shifted retail sales to them as they dropped the prices to $20-$30 instead of the original $80+ Videotapes started at. Of course they offered the rental chains the original tape formulation at the original high prices. So rental shops would buy a couple of them plus a bunch of the short lifespan copies to handle the initial surge. As demand dropped they would unload the crappy ones on the 'previewed' shelf before they were totally useless.
> Never will it be the fact that buying it on blu-ray allows me to play it on only one device
> in my house when I have many more capable of playing movies.
Which wouldn't be a problem if blu-ray was as cracked as DVD, drop it down to DVD for the kids room, the portable DVD players, the car, etc. But no they had to put hard ass crypto on it so bad the players required huge processors just to do the crypto and of course for the JAVA bullcrap. Most BD players have frickin' cooling fans!
I won't be buying BD until it plays on VLC or Mplayer. Because if either of those can play it, extracting the movie is straightforward.
> Why don't you just go down to the Apple store and ask to shown around.
> It's what all those macs are sitting there for.
1. Using Mapquest's estimate, the closest Apple store is 2:56 away.
2. A half hour playing with a demo unit isn't likely to be very helpful. Especially compared to a few hours with a VM.
3. Even if I didn't like OS X enough to want to drink the Kool-Aid, a VM version would, as others pointed out, allow an occasional use to test compatibility. That would be enough to spend $130 on, but not $600 plus a KVM and all that other crap to support a whole physical PC.
> You can run a virtual Mac in qemu using the "-M mac" option.
I have heard this before. Is this an out of tree patchset? On Fedora 11 I get this:
$ qemu -M help
Supported machines are:
pc Standard PC (default)
isapc ISA-only PC
I'd love to explore OS X a bit, but the price tag to get in the gate and look around is just to much unless you have already drank the Kool-Aid. The mini at $599 is sort of a joke and everything else goes over the 1K line.
> current "digital copy included!" DVDs on the market
I laugh every time I see that sticker on a DVD. Guys, don't ya know what the first D in DVD stands for? Or are you assuming we customers don't? Every DVD is a digital copy of the movie and the DRM is pretty broken these days. Yes a few of the newest titles introduce a new twist it takes a little while for the copy programs to catch up to but it isn't a serious problem. And if you just want a copy of the main feature mplayer is pretty much foolproof in being able to dump you a usable stream.
> Each time Linux redesigns some subsystem there are problems, and we see
> the same people bitching about how we should use $ALTERNATIVE instead...
No, the situation with Pulse is different in several ways.
1. With previous changes there was pain in the transition but even those suffering most could see that the change was going to be a good thing. Not so with Pulse. Pulseaudio is a system that would be, at best, a minor improvement in a perfect world and a never ending nightmare in the real one. Harsh charge? Read on.
2. Pulse blameshifts all it's problems to apps and drivers. Ok, apps (open source ones anyway) will eventually get fixed. Drivers won't. Motherboards do not ship with sound drivers for Linux. Linux ships generic drivers for the sound chips on popular systems. There is a big difference. Board makers connect those generic chips in a myriad of ways, poorly documented if at all outside the Windows driver. Manual intervention and exploration is usually required to figure out what is connected to what and how best to configure things. Pulse's design is to remove all controls except one big volume slider.
Examples: My desktop system requires careful balancing of the VIA DXS, PCM and Master sliders to get enough output to drive my speakers and avoid clipping in the digital side of the system. My Thinkpad needs an easy way to mute the master output to silence the internal speaker while leaving the external output alone to get good results while docked. Feel free to add your story, if enough of us provide use cases where ONE slider won't work.... they will ignore all of us. :(
3. It still isn't even clear exactly what problem Pulse is supposed to be a solution to. Every major application had finally achieved stable ALSA support, and ALSA works. Being able to move sound streams between devices while they play is gee whiz and all, but it isn't a problem most of us are needing enough to endure a lot of pain to get. It might be worth the pain if we were being promised this would be THE audio solution but the Pulse devs themselves admit it isn't, Pulse can't touch JACKs realtime features.
4. But the biggest problem with Pulse is the devs. There are real problems but this time, unlike past transitions, this isn't a case of they haven't fixed all the bugs yet, it isn't even a case where they tell ya to submit a damned patch if ya want your problem fixed NOW. Both of those cases are normal examples of Free Software development. No, what is new is bugs being closed with "That problem can't exist within our philosophy and thus can't be fixed, buy new hardware and hope it works." In other words, that problem can't be fixed without exposing complexity we don't believe should exist. They have forgotten the second half of "Make things as simple as possible, but no more."