What in the biggest steaming pile of eskimo dinosaur crap does a teenage pr0n video that got sold by a third party on an auction site have to do with copyrighted matierial in any sense of the word?!!
Lots of ranting about how the US is just going to scoff at this "international law." I'd also like to point out that the term "International Law" is a lot of fluff, seeing as there is no International Government. And, no, the UN doesn't count, since it has no authority over the governments it supposedly presides over.
This one should have been from the "Matter-of-time" department. I mean, really, how many of us who work with computers on a daily basis didn't see this one coming? Electronic systems are our livelyhood, and each and every one of us knows that the fail-rate is high enough that you should NEVER entrust human lives to this kind of technology. A pacemaker is one thing, where if it goes you only risk one life, (sad but true, wish it weren't so) but when you put that kind of system into a 1-ton killing machine and expect perfect results...well, that's just not smart.
A D-Link port-80-only firewall can be had at any number of electronics stores (heck, probably at Walgreen's too) for $79. It isn't a total solution, but it will protect a personal machine long enough to get the Windows Updates installed.
If the author is unaware of this, or not capable of installing such a device on his Internet connection, just how seriously can we take the rest of his essay?
The key problem with this is getting them to buy the damn thing.
I have clients (currently working as a freelance tech guy) who take quite a bit of convincing to buy ANY new stuff, irregardless of how badly they need it, and I get creds because they're paying me to tell them this stuff.
When it comes to family, however, I get no instant karma. If they see it as a superfluous expense, they won't buy it no matter what worm is in the wild.
Frankly, I've decided to let them be. There's another computer guy in the family that actually seems to enjoy rescuing them when their computer is infected.
Getting back to the point, the firewall isn't going to do any good on the store shelf, the clueless noob has to BUY the damn thing.
BZZZT! Wrong! Apple is having trouble keeping up with market demand because they are successful. When a company has more units than it has demand for, *that's* when the company is "fucked." Whether it will be an industry savior or not is to be determined, that they are doing better than any consumer level computer maker out there is undisputable, and the number of interested potential customers proves it. THAT's what can be learned from his little story. Take a business class.
Thanks for the response. I am going to crawl out on a limb and guess that you grew up with religion in your life. That is a big advantage in the faith department.
Heh. Actually, my dad is an agnostic, my mom was a liberal yuppy-hippy (not quite "mellow" enough to be a "real" hippy), and my step-mom (the one who really raised me) was a feminist-atheist. The most religious background I had was the vague notion that there were people who believed in god and some limited "Garden of Eden" mythology.
I converted against the wishes of just about everybody who I knew at the time.
I think religion is a bit like language; it is easier to learn it while young.
I would disagree. Sure, you know the lingo, you've got a head start on getting "ins" in the community, and you don't bug people with questions, but that's not the point of any religion. I think religion is more like a programming language. There's always some basic, simple commands that allow you to do the very most fundamental "Hello, World!" stuff that everyone must learn to get started. From there it depends on what you want to do with it. Some people prefer GUIs(missionary work), others are better at driver design(priesthood ordinance work), and still others excel at applications(services provided to members and community).
The pitfall is, of course, you get organizations like Microsoft in the picture that says "OUR way is the ONLY way to go! If you do it any other way, you're CAST OUT!"
Personally, my beliefs are a little bit science, a little bit Taoism, a little bit what I have personally figured out, and a good chunk from my church. It drives my wife nuts when I present some of my ideas to her, because they conflict with what her mother taught her, which is what her mother taught her... Basicly, because she grew up in the church, she got fed alot of stuff that she never bothered to question before we met. Now, she's getting into astronomy and physics because I expanded her mind *just enough* to where she could expand it the rest of the way herself. Pretty soon she'll be challenging me.;)
I've talked with people who are close in my life about this and they would tell me that I just need to open my heart and take a leap. Those may well be apt metaphors for what they are talking about but I still have no idea how that is done or what they really mean.
Translation: Live with your ignorance. I hate that! The thing to remember about religion is that, while it may help you in general ways, providing inspiration, motivation, etc., it won't give you direct answers. If you want answers, you're going to have to look around and figure things out. The purpose of any religion, I believe, is to spur you on with the right questions to focus your search. Basic teaching technique, really. When the student asks a question, you ask them questions to direct them toward the answer, or else they won't actually learn the answer.
Let me see if I can relate this in a way that's a bit more clear: I'm a Mormon, and one of the things Mormons are infamous for is our avoidance of alcohol, tabaco, and cafinated drinks. At the time the commandment (more on that later) was put in place that these things should be avoided, no one had any reason to think they were anything but anoyances to clean up after. (This is the faith in God bit:) However, the members of the Church followed the commandment. 150 years later, we have ample evidence that tabaco is adictive and dangerous, alcohol impares judgment and lends itself to addictive behaviors (not to mention is a poison that takes out the liver first), and there's more and more studies that coffee and certain teas are bad for your system. (Tanic acid, not caffine, is the bad part, contrary to popular belief. Caffine can actually be benificial to your health when taken in moderation. Note that three Red Bull's in one day is NOT moderation.) The leap of faith is that there's a
Some people get by fine on faith and that works for them. I've known many happy faithful people and I sometimes even envy that quality in them. But that just isn't how I work. I look at the world with an innate need to figure it out. This makes it impossible for me to take any religion literally. I suspect this is common with many geeks.
Being someone who has the same mindset but believes in God (yes, it's possible), my take on it is this: God is like that uber-geek that you look up to when you're first getting into computers/programming/whatever. He's got lots of knowledge and tries to communicate that knowledge to you, but he just knows you're going to try all those stupid mistakes that everyone makes because it's just part of the learning process. Of course, I subscribe to what I irreverantly refer to as the Open-Source religion. (having nothing whatsoever to do with Richard Stallman) Basically, being rather more intelligent than anyone in my "congrigation," I lap the bishop on some stuff, but some of the General Authorities in my church (one's a nuclear physicist, one's a doctor, a couple are millionaires...I could go on, but I'm not going to do the research right at this moment) could EASILY lap me.
I kind of shot off topic there, let me get back to my point. God wants us to figure out the universe. (contrary to what many troglodyte bible-bashers want their followers to think) The problem most geeks have with religion, I suspect, is that the dipsticks of the rank and file see the English language KJV translation of a hebrew text that itself wasn't written down until a few dozen generations after the "religion" was "organized" and presume that the limited observations of a spoiled prince convert are actual scientific observations. The bulk of scripture has nothing to do with science, but rank-n-file thinks it does, turning off most geeks who might genuinely want answers to questions and are rather put off by the vehement bible-thumping of narrow-minded...
OK, I'm ranting, sorry. Point is, if you don't let others dictate to you what you know is wrong, religion can fit perfectly with science, and I'm not just talking about Mormonism, Christianity, Judaism, or any western religion in particular. Heck, some of the old Native American religions can be downright startlingly accurate in their teaching about how things work.
Just to make a simple but reasonblly respectable* site would need two years of university education if you never done it before.
2 months and an XHTML 1.0 tutorial book. Your site likely won't be the bell-and-whistle site like a corprate site, and it won't be a massive social changer like a co-op site (like Slashdot), but then, it's a personal website. It's not supposed to be a big deal.
Why is this important? Gutenberg didn't invent the printing press, but he did popularize it's use and contributed to the Reformation by using it to print the first Bibles that weren't in Latin.
Once enough people buy/borrow/copy these MP3's on a completely legal basis, they'll begin wondering what's so special about all that stuff that's not God's Word that they should be able to listen to just as freely.:D
(Yes, I am aware that Mormons and mainstream Christians don't get along much. That's not the point, and I'm not going to argue about it or any related topic.)
It's also gratifying to know that some companies out there actually use the MP3 format instead of being afraid of it.
*CHAN-2000 - This robot specializes in only one style, performs very flashy moves, only behaves exactly according to the Assimov rules, and says "I'm sorry!" whenever it damages anything in the course of its operation.
*DB-GOKU3 - Overpowers oponents with lots of grunting, bulging wires, and staring. Spouts meaningless drivel about power levels on a regular basis.
*Tendo, Inc. "Anything Goes(TM) Saotome EgoBot" - This robot is built from top of the line parts and is housed in a sleak chassis. Using top-secret programming, this model can quickly learn and adapt any martial arts moves it sees, but is nearly useless for anything else. One further bug...er, feature; splashing cold water anywhere on the water-proof chassis will result in reconfiguration of all I/O data connectors from male plugs to female ports. Warm water reverses this change.
*LiEXTREME - This robot can perform a variety of styles, most of them very fast and overly complex. Bugs in the Japanese-English translation codecs keep this robot from becoming popular in the States.
*Microsoft XBot - Delivered two years after the announced date, the XBot's controls are oversized and difficult to use. Very few styles are available for the XBot, so few that Microsoft has to buy one of the best dojos just to have access to the styles it uses, then declares that all styles from that dojo will now be XBot exclusives. Regardless of the marketting hype, consumer reports of crashed XBots on showroom floors, lack of styles, rumors of draconian penalties for trying to "mod" the XBot, and the proprietary XBot Tournament Network keep this robot from having any real success in the market.
*Apple iFight - With a female form factor and incredible attention to design, this robot easily blows the other robots away on sheer looks. The most recent transition to a brushed metal chassis has been called a bad aesthetics move by some, but hailed by others as making this fighting "girl" attractive to the serious fight-goer. Unfortunetly, until recently Apple's battle robots have been incompatible with most styles, so are only now being taken seriously in the fighting circuit. This robots internals and engineering are vastly different from the other robots, leading many to misjudge and underestimate the iFight's capabilities. The iFight remains a niche player, as the designer price to go with the designer looks is out of the range of most fighting enthusiasts.
*SCO LawJaw - The SCO LawJaw looks impressive, but opening the chassis reveals a simple remote control receiver and a tape-recorder that spews trashtalk. Who precicely is really in control of this "robot" remains to be seen, though some suspect Microsoft, who poured a generous ammount of money into the development of the LawJaw for suspicious reasons.
*Texas Instruments Norris - Hoping to attract an American audience with a corn-fed look, the Norris looks impressive but is viewed with suspicion by fighting enthusiasts.
"Dime Bar" is manufactured by Kraft foods, a company which has its origins in the USA in 1765. Advertised heavily on UK television with american accents.
Ah, one of those "let's market something as foriegn, even if it's not, really." Rather like Chop Suey, American invention, everyone thinks it's an oriental import. Here in the States (Or, at least, Colorado, California, Missouri, Massachusetts, and Texas (which is all the places in the States I've spent enough time in to justify a candy related purchase), there is no "Dime" bar. Dollars to donuts (or "Pounds to Pudding" if you like) it actually IS some confection that is made in the States, it's just marketed under a different name where you are.
The metric system was invented before I was born; I don't absorb shillings and hapennies through temporal osmosis.
Didn't say you did. In all fairness, I chose the wrong word. I meant to say "decimal," not "metric."
I think it was John Adams who got fed up with the... confusing system of English currency and fought tooth and nail with the other Founding Fathers to use the decimal system instead of whatever the heck it was England used. England didn't adopt a similar system until later.
I just don't understand why USians can't put numbers, e.g. 1, 5, 10, 25 on their coins (as digits, not in the unofficial but widely used local language) to explain their denominations.
The same reason Brits use "rubber" for eraser, the Japanese use "about" for casual, and Austrailians use "mate" for friend/casual aquantance/lover/etc. It's a cultural thing. We in the US grew up with the coins as they are, and can often tell you what change we have just by the feel of the coin itself. (Small with rough edges is ten cents, large with smooth edges is five cents, small with smooth edges is one cent, etc.)
Er, I've never heard of a chewy caremel bar called the "Dime". And if the American system is so appaling, why did it take "merry ol' England" 50 years longer than the U.S. to impliment a metric currency system?
...I'd have rated most of them "Troll" right off the bat. While I have no doubt that all these items should be covered in regular news, rather than being totally ignored because they can't be soundbite-ed, nearly every single "headline" listed is purposely designed to be inflamitory. Further, there are several "headlines" that seem blatantly leftist. I went to the site expecting to see something unbiased, I was severely disapointed.
It took them this long? Then again, I did work in the computer department of a community college, who took their cues from the big universities nearby. If the university networks were as kludgy and swiss-cheesed as the community college networks, it's no surprise they have problems.
Sure, it's fun to let people on and learn the hard way, but these days there's too high a price to pay for another persons ignorance.
What the author of this article misses is that the various OSS groups (Like the *DM people) aren't a competing company trying to take over market- and mind-share. They are people who are doing what they want to do, (freedom of choice) what they have the basic natural rights to do, (survival and the pursuit of happiness) and what they're sick of others telling them they're not allowed to do. (Microsoft being a big violator)
<soapbox>
Irregardless of what you think of the state of the U.S.A. today, the founding fathers had the same basic idea, do what you want to do (freedom of choice), do what you have a right to do, (survival and the pursuit of happiness) and they were sick of others telling them they're not allowed to do that. (British crown and Parliment)
In both cases, had those in power actually *listened* to the complaints of those they were actively ignoring, and if the "underdogs" didn't have rable-rousers (Sam Adams for the American Revolution, Noel Godin of the anti-MS crowd to name just two examples), the entire thing may have simply come to a footnote in history. "There was a problem, it got solved, moving on."
The "American Englishmen" of the 18th century were in such a small minority compared to the rest of the British Empire that their complaints and way of doing things were completely ignored by the average British citizen. On the same token, the average Windows user couldn't care less what a bunch of weird geeks do, they just want to live their lives.
The average computer user has no idea what goes on under the hood, nor are they aware of the many times that their computer use has been compromised by those who hold the keys to their computer (the OS vendor). Those of us who do know better realize that by leaving these keys in the hands of a select few, those select few can (and have) become corrupted. You doubt? Take a look at the whole "Digital Rights Management" fiasco. DRM is all about the profit of a select few, NOT the real rights of the people who's "Digital" material is being "Managed."
On the plus side, the minority gets a victory every-so-often. Going back to DRM, most DRM schemes have failed miserably, for the simple reason that the uber-geeks (the tiny minority of computer users who read/. and similar services) have spread the word about the restrictive nature of these schemes.
</soapbox>
It's no wonder he doesn't understand why we (the geeks in the OSS community, yes even the "users") don't make Linux more Windows-like, because he's thinking in dollars and cents and mind-share. The whole point to OSS is freedom, not figures on a ledger.
Get off my back, monkey -- I don't WANT to be organized or spoken for. Not by you, nor anyone else.
While I agree with you in principle, what you fail to realize in this case is that SCO is composed of bureaucrats. When a bureaucrat decides he/she is going to fuss with somebody, they don't think "Let me go to the source," the think, "What organization do I deal with to find the person in charge of this particular matter?"
This is totally wasteful, especially when folks such as you and me make their information known to as many people as possible for the express purpose of being easy to contact.
However, they're the ones who are trying to make the rules. Sure, the entirety of the *nix Communities are ROTFL their @$$es off, but the SCO bureaucrats will never see this, even if they are strapped down "Clockwork Orange" style to watch it. What they will see is an official letterhead with the signature of someone who has made waves in the business world. Given that ESR is President of the OSI who consults with (the former) Netscape, IBM, Apple, and others, that's who they will pay attention to.
So, you don't want to be represented? Too bad, because irregardless of how much you may spit fire and brimstone, no matter how many flags you send up or emails you send, no matter how many phone calls you make, unless you're an organization and have a lawyer, SCO won't talk to you. People like ESR are absolutely necessary when dealing with the SCO, because they are willing to paint a huge target on their own backs to take the legal bullet for people like you an me.
I am, frankly, very glad that ESR is on our side in this. If (by some incredible fluke in an evil mirror universe) ESR jumped in with SCO, the only real "figureheads" for open source/free software would be RMS and Linus. Not bad people to have on your side, but RMS looks and acts like a hippy that missed the '80s, and Linus still behaves pretty much like a college student. They're both great in real life, but not in the court room.
I know I'm going to be modded down for this, but it's gotta be said; the author of both articles is very full of himself, prefering to talk about "enlightened" gaming and how games were so much better "back when *I* was a kid," and yet barely discusses the subject matter at hand, good game endings. The first article is particularly bad about this. The author discusses the so-called glory days of games and moans about how modern games don't hold a candle to the good ol' games of yor, without justifying his opinion in the slightest. (His comments about games "winding down" nearly drove me up a wall.) The second article is just plain BAD! It's like jumping into the middle of a dialog where you don't know what is being discussed. There's at leasttwo voices in each part, and neither goes into any detail about the mentioned game. I've played some of these games and I was still confused.
Disregarding the MacOS method of handling mount/unmount, one nice way MacOS handles removable media is when you don't have a disc in the drive, the drive isn't cluttering up your GUI workspace. It's not there until you need it, and goes away when you're done with it. I have yet to see this function enabled consistently on any *nix distro/fork.
This is understandably impossible do handle with floppies, but brick-stupid easy with CDs, networked drives, and most other types of removable media. Heck, even the old QIC-80 drives had auto-detect functions that the right software flag could monitor. Basically the only reason this couldn't be enabled for a particular media is if the hardware designers were lazy (in the case of the IBM-PC floppy) and didn't set up a hardware auto-mount.
What if the process accessing the disk belongs to the root user, and the user attempting to press the eject button is a lowly peon?
I'm not sure about server environments, but I've often found in most situations involving a removable disc of whatever type that the person who put the media in the machine is the same one who wants to take it out, even on multi-user systems.
Further, down the road when the internet is one giant mesh network, it's unlikely that anyone will be that forgiving on a machine that refuses to eject media because Faqid from India found a file on the media that he needs and is in the process of downloading it.
Of course, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Re:Parent point valid despite foul language
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Worst Linux Annoyances?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
What do you think would happen if the CD being ejected was RW and some process was writing to it at the time?
This and all arguements like it are clever little distractions, but one should remember that Linux has a nice little feature that Windows or even MacOS does not, total and complete customability. So some code is added that allows you autounmount and eject a CD from a drive just by pushing the drive button. 24 hours later, someone else adds code that makes it a script option in the automount/unmount program so you have to "manually" unmount it in a server environment. 2 weeks later, this is incorperated by yet another programmer into a nice GUI interface for one of the Window Managers, and within a month it's incorperated into all the WMs. By the end of the year, all *nix variants have it, and by second quarter of next year, there's access security built in. Write the damned code and the users AND programmers will come!
Keep in mind that once these people start learning, some of them will want to go on to more advanced stuff. Once someone learns the basics of a spreadsheet, they may want to learn some of the more advanced formulas available, or perhaps formatting techniques.
Also, those off-the-wall classes might not be as out there as you think. I'm constantly teaching my co-workers (they're bean-counters) about hacker ethics, and sometimes I can't get any actual work done because they want to know more.
Slashdot Mirror
What in the biggest steaming pile of eskimo dinosaur crap does a teenage pr0n video that got sold by a third party on an auction site have to do with copyrighted matierial in any sense of the word?!!
Lots of ranting about how the US is just going to scoff at this "international law."
I'd also like to point out that the term "International Law" is a lot of fluff, seeing as there is no International Government. And, no, the UN doesn't count, since it has no authority over the governments it supposedly presides over.
This one should have been from the "Matter-of-time" department. I mean, really, how many of us who work with computers on a daily basis didn't see this one coming? Electronic systems are our livelyhood, and each and every one of us knows that the fail-rate is high enough that you should NEVER entrust human lives to this kind of technology. A pacemaker is one thing, where if it goes you only risk one life, (sad but true, wish it weren't so) but when you put that kind of system into a 1-ton killing machine and expect perfect results...well, that's just not smart.
"Do you like
Sa-sausages?"
Repeat for about five minutes, varying only toward the end where you slowly fade in;
"Do you like
cheeeeeeese?"
True story!
The key problem with this is getting them to buy the damn thing.
I have clients (currently working as a freelance tech guy) who take quite a bit of convincing to buy ANY new stuff, irregardless of how badly they need it, and I get creds because they're paying me to tell them this stuff.
When it comes to family, however, I get no instant karma. If they see it as a superfluous expense, they won't buy it no matter what worm is in the wild.
Frankly, I've decided to let them be. There's another computer guy in the family that actually seems to enjoy rescuing them when their computer is infected.
Getting back to the point, the firewall isn't going to do any good on the store shelf, the clueless noob has to BUY the damn thing.
BZZZT! Wrong! Apple is having trouble keeping up with market demand because they are successful. When a company has more units than it has demand for, *that's* when the company is "fucked." Whether it will be an industry savior or not is to be determined, that they are doing better than any consumer level computer maker out there is undisputable, and the number of interested potential customers proves it. THAT's what can be learned from his little story. Take a business class.
Heh. Actually, my dad is an agnostic, my mom was a liberal yuppy-hippy (not quite "mellow" enough to be a "real" hippy), and my step-mom (the one who really raised me) was a feminist-atheist. The most religious background I had was the vague notion that there were people who believed in god and some limited "Garden of Eden" mythology.
I converted against the wishes of just about everybody who I knew at the time.
I think religion is a bit like language; it is easier to learn it while young.
I would disagree. Sure, you know the lingo, you've got a head start on getting "ins" in the community, and you don't bug people with questions, but that's not the point of any religion. I think religion is more like a programming language. There's always some basic, simple commands that allow you to do the very most fundamental "Hello, World!" stuff that everyone must learn to get started. From there it depends on what you want to do with it. Some people prefer GUIs(missionary work), others are better at driver design(priesthood ordinance work), and still others excel at applications(services provided to members and community).
The pitfall is, of course, you get organizations like Microsoft in the picture that says "OUR way is the ONLY way to go! If you do it any other way, you're CAST OUT!"
Personally, my beliefs are a little bit science, a little bit Taoism, a little bit what I have personally figured out, and a good chunk from my church. It drives my wife nuts when I present some of my ideas to her, because they conflict with what her mother taught her, which is what her mother taught her... Basicly, because she grew up in the church, she got fed alot of stuff that she never bothered to question before we met. Now, she's getting into astronomy and physics because I expanded her mind *just enough* to where she could expand it the rest of the way herself. Pretty soon she'll be challenging me. ;)
I've talked with people who are close in my life about this and they would tell me that I just need to open my heart and take a leap. Those may well be apt metaphors for what they are talking about but I still have no idea how that is done or what they really mean.
Translation: Live with your ignorance. I hate that! The thing to remember about religion is that, while it may help you in general ways, providing inspiration, motivation, etc., it won't give you direct answers. If you want answers, you're going to have to look around and figure things out. The purpose of any religion, I believe, is to spur you on with the right questions to focus your search. Basic teaching technique, really. When the student asks a question, you ask them questions to direct them toward the answer, or else they won't actually learn the answer.
Let me see if I can relate this in a way that's a bit more clear: I'm a Mormon, and one of the things Mormons are infamous for is our avoidance of alcohol, tabaco, and cafinated drinks. At the time the commandment (more on that later) was put in place that these things should be avoided, no one had any reason to think they were anything but anoyances to clean up after. (This is the faith in God bit:) However, the members of the Church followed the commandment. 150 years later, we have ample evidence that tabaco is adictive and dangerous, alcohol impares judgment and lends itself to addictive behaviors (not to mention is a poison that takes out the liver first), and there's more and more studies that coffee and certain teas are bad for your system. (Tanic acid, not caffine, is the bad part, contrary to popular belief. Caffine can actually be benificial to your health when taken in moderation. Note that three Red Bull's in one day is NOT moderation.) The leap of faith is that there's a
But that just isn't how I work. I look at the world with an innate need to figure it out. This makes it impossible for me to take any religion literally.
I suspect this is common with many geeks.
Being someone who has the same mindset but believes in God (yes, it's possible), my take on it is this: God is like that uber-geek that you look up to when you're first getting into computers/programming/whatever. He's got lots of knowledge and tries to communicate that knowledge to you, but he just knows you're going to try all those stupid mistakes that everyone makes because it's just part of the learning process. Of course, I subscribe to what I irreverantly refer to as the Open-Source religion. (having nothing whatsoever to do with Richard Stallman) Basically, being rather more intelligent than anyone in my "congrigation," I lap the bishop on some stuff, but some of the General Authorities in my church (one's a nuclear physicist, one's a doctor, a couple are millionaires...I could go on, but I'm not going to do the research right at this moment) could EASILY lap me.
I kind of shot off topic there, let me get back to my point. God wants us to figure out the universe. (contrary to what many troglodyte bible-bashers want their followers to think) The problem most geeks have with religion, I suspect, is that the dipsticks of the rank and file see the English language KJV translation of a hebrew text that itself wasn't written down until a few dozen generations after the "religion" was "organized" and presume that the limited observations of a spoiled prince convert are actual scientific observations. The bulk of scripture has nothing to do with science, but rank-n-file thinks it does, turning off most geeks who might genuinely want answers to questions and are rather put off by the vehement bible-thumping of narrow-minded...
OK, I'm ranting, sorry. Point is, if you don't let others dictate to you what you know is wrong, religion can fit perfectly with science, and I'm not just talking about Mormonism, Christianity, Judaism, or any western religion in particular. Heck, some of the old Native American religions can be downright startlingly accurate in their teaching about how things work.
...
Ranting again. Shutting up.
2 months and an XHTML 1.0 tutorial book. Your site likely won't be the bell-and-whistle site like a corprate site, and it won't be a massive social changer like a co-op site (like Slashdot), but then, it's a personal website. It's not supposed to be a big deal.
You know how printing took off when Gutenberg first published the Bible in German? Well, someone got their hands on audio versions of loads of Mormon literature and converted it all into MP3 format and is selling it all on CD-ROM. They've also got just the basic scriptures (Old Testament a.k.a. Torah, New Testament, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price) available.
Why is this important? Gutenberg didn't invent the printing press, but he did popularize it's use and contributed to the Reformation by using it to print the first Bibles that weren't in Latin.
Once enough people buy/borrow/copy these MP3's on a completely legal basis, they'll begin wondering what's so special about all that stuff that's not God's Word that they should be able to listen to just as freely. :D
(Yes, I am aware that Mormons and mainstream Christians don't get along much. That's not the point, and I'm not going to argue about it or any related topic.)
It's also gratifying to know that some companies out there actually use the MP3 format instead of being afraid of it.
These robots are being planned for 2006 release:
*CHAN-2000 - This robot specializes in only one style, performs very flashy moves, only behaves exactly according to the Assimov rules, and says "I'm sorry!" whenever it damages anything in the course of its operation.
*DB-GOKU3 - Overpowers oponents with lots of grunting, bulging wires, and staring. Spouts meaningless drivel about power levels on a regular basis.
*Tendo, Inc. "Anything Goes(TM) Saotome EgoBot" - This robot is built from top of the line parts and is housed in a sleak chassis. Using top-secret programming, this model can quickly learn and adapt any martial arts moves it sees, but is nearly useless for anything else. One further bug...er, feature; splashing cold water anywhere on the water-proof chassis will result in reconfiguration of all I/O data connectors from male plugs to female ports. Warm water reverses this change.
*LiEXTREME - This robot can perform a variety of styles, most of them very fast and overly complex. Bugs in the Japanese-English translation codecs keep this robot from becoming popular in the States.
*Microsoft XBot - Delivered two years after the announced date, the XBot's controls are oversized and difficult to use. Very few styles are available for the XBot, so few that Microsoft has to buy one of the best dojos just to have access to the styles it uses, then declares that all styles from that dojo will now be XBot exclusives. Regardless of the marketting hype, consumer reports of crashed XBots on showroom floors, lack of styles, rumors of draconian penalties for trying to "mod" the XBot, and the proprietary XBot Tournament Network keep this robot from having any real success in the market.
*Apple iFight - With a female form factor and incredible attention to design, this robot easily blows the other robots away on sheer looks. The most recent transition to a brushed metal chassis has been called a bad aesthetics move by some, but hailed by others as making this fighting "girl" attractive to the serious fight-goer. Unfortunetly, until recently Apple's battle robots have been incompatible with most styles, so are only now being taken seriously in the fighting circuit. This robots internals and engineering are vastly different from the other robots, leading many to misjudge and underestimate the iFight's capabilities. The iFight remains a niche player, as the designer price to go with the designer looks is out of the range of most fighting enthusiasts.
*SCO LawJaw - The SCO LawJaw looks impressive, but opening the chassis reveals a simple remote control receiver and a tape-recorder that spews trashtalk. Who precicely is really in control of this "robot" remains to be seen, though some suspect Microsoft, who poured a generous ammount of money into the development of the LawJaw for suspicious reasons.
*Texas Instruments Norris - Hoping to attract an American audience with a corn-fed look, the Norris looks impressive but is viewed with suspicion by fighting enthusiasts.
"Dime Bar" is manufactured by Kraft foods, a company which has its origins in the USA in 1765. Advertised heavily on UK television with american accents.
Ah, one of those "let's market something as foriegn, even if it's not, really." Rather like Chop Suey, American invention, everyone thinks it's an oriental import. Here in the States (Or, at least, Colorado, California, Missouri, Massachusetts, and Texas (which is all the places in the States I've spent enough time in to justify a candy related purchase), there is no "Dime" bar. Dollars to donuts (or "Pounds to Pudding" if you like) it actually IS some confection that is made in the States, it's just marketed under a different name where you are.
The metric system was invented before I was born; I don't absorb shillings and hapennies through temporal osmosis.
Didn't say you did. In all fairness, I chose the wrong word. I meant to say "decimal," not "metric."
I think it was John Adams who got fed up with the... confusing system of English currency and fought tooth and nail with the other Founding Fathers to use the decimal system instead of whatever the heck it was England used. England didn't adopt a similar system until later.
I just don't understand why USians can't put numbers, e.g. 1, 5, 10, 25 on their coins (as digits, not in the unofficial but widely used local language) to explain their denominations.
The same reason Brits use "rubber" for eraser, the Japanese use "about" for casual, and Austrailians use "mate" for friend/casual aquantance/lover/etc. It's a cultural thing. We in the US grew up with the coins as they are, and can often tell you what change we have just by the feel of the coin itself. (Small with rough edges is ten cents, large with smooth edges is five cents, small with smooth edges is one cent, etc.)
Er, I've never heard of a chewy caremel bar called the "Dime". And if the American system is so appaling, why did it take "merry ol' England" 50 years longer than the U.S. to impliment a metric currency system?
...I'd have rated most of them "Troll" right off the bat. While I have no doubt that all these items should be covered in regular news, rather than being totally ignored because they can't be soundbite-ed, nearly every single "headline" listed is purposely designed to be inflamitory. Further, there are several "headlines" that seem blatantly leftist. I went to the site expecting to see something unbiased, I was severely disapointed.
It took them this long? Then again, I did work in the computer department of a community college, who took their cues from the big universities nearby. If the university networks were as kludgy and swiss-cheesed as the community college networks, it's no surprise they have problems.
Sure, it's fun to let people on and learn the hard way, but these days there's too high a price to pay for another persons ignorance.
In both cases, had those in power actually *listened* to the complaints of those they were actively ignoring, and if the "underdogs" didn't have rable-rousers (Sam Adams for the American Revolution, Noel Godin of the anti-MS crowd to name just two examples), the entire thing may have simply come to a footnote in history. "There was a problem, it got solved, moving on."
The "American Englishmen" of the 18th century were in such a small minority compared to the rest of the British Empire that their complaints and way of doing things were completely ignored by the average British citizen. On the same token, the average Windows user couldn't care less what a bunch of weird geeks do, they just want to live their lives.
The average computer user has no idea what goes on under the hood, nor are they aware of the many times that their computer use has been compromised by those who hold the keys to their computer (the OS vendor). Those of us who do know better realize that by leaving these keys in the hands of a select few, those select few can (and have) become corrupted. You doubt? Take a look at the whole "Digital Rights Management" fiasco. DRM is all about the profit of a select few, NOT the real rights of the people who's "Digital" material is being "Managed."
On the plus side, the minority gets a victory every-so-often. Going back to DRM, most DRM schemes have failed miserably, for the simple reason that the uber-geeks (the tiny minority of computer users who read
Get off my back, monkey -- I don't WANT to be organized or spoken for. Not by you, nor anyone else.
While I agree with you in principle, what you fail to realize in this case is that SCO is composed of bureaucrats. When a bureaucrat decides he/she is going to fuss with somebody, they don't think "Let me go to the source," the think, "What organization do I deal with to find the person in charge of this particular matter?"
This is totally wasteful, especially when folks such as you and me make their information known to as many people as possible for the express purpose of being easy to contact.
However, they're the ones who are trying to make the rules. Sure, the entirety of the *nix Communities are ROTFL their @$$es off, but the SCO bureaucrats will never see this, even if they are strapped down "Clockwork Orange" style to watch it . What they will see is an official letterhead with the signature of someone who has made waves in the business world. Given that ESR is President of the OSI who consults with (the former) Netscape, IBM, Apple, and others, that's who they will pay attention to.
So, you don't want to be represented? Too bad, because irregardless of how much you may spit fire and brimstone, no matter how many flags you send up or emails you send, no matter how many phone calls you make, unless you're an organization and have a lawyer, SCO won't talk to you. People like ESR are absolutely necessary when dealing with the SCO, because they are willing to paint a huge target on their own backs to take the legal bullet for people like you an me.
I am, frankly, very glad that ESR is on our side in this. If (by some incredible fluke in an evil mirror universe) ESR jumped in with SCO, the only real "figureheads" for open source/free software would be RMS and Linus. Not bad people to have on your side, but RMS looks and acts like a hippy that missed the '80s, and Linus still behaves pretty much like a college student. They're both great in real life, but not in the court room.
Which is where this will all be settled.
I know I'm going to be modded down for this, but it's gotta be said; the author of both articles is very full of himself, prefering to talk about "enlightened" gaming and how games were so much better "back when *I* was a kid," and yet barely discusses the subject matter at hand, good game endings. The first article is particularly bad about this. The author discusses the so-called glory days of games and moans about how modern games don't hold a candle to the good ol' games of yor, without justifying his opinion in the slightest. (His comments about games "winding down" nearly drove me up a wall.)
The second article is just plain BAD! It's like jumping into the middle of a dialog where you don't know what is being discussed. There's at least two voices in each part, and neither goes into any detail about the mentioned game. I've played some of these games and I was still confused.
The man has a point. I am, admittedly, more of a software guy than hardware, so I wasn't aware that was the case.
Gotta be a workaround somehow, though...
Disregarding the MacOS method of handling mount/unmount, one nice way MacOS handles removable media is when you don't have a disc in the drive, the drive isn't cluttering up your GUI workspace. It's not there until you need it, and goes away when you're done with it. I have yet to see this function enabled consistently on any *nix distro/fork.
This is understandably impossible do handle with floppies, but brick-stupid easy with CDs, networked drives, and most other types of removable media. Heck, even the old QIC-80 drives had auto-detect functions that the right software flag could monitor. Basically the only reason this couldn't be enabled for a particular media is if the hardware designers were lazy (in the case of the IBM-PC floppy) and didn't set up a hardware auto-mount.
What if the process accessing the disk belongs to the root user, and the user attempting to press the eject button is a lowly peon?
I'm not sure about server environments, but I've often found in most situations involving a removable disc of whatever type that the person who put the media in the machine is the same one who wants to take it out, even on multi-user systems.
Further, down the road when the internet is one giant mesh network, it's unlikely that anyone will be that forgiving on a machine that refuses to eject media because Faqid from India found a file on the media that he needs and is in the process of downloading it.
Of course, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
What do you think would happen if the CD being ejected was RW and some process was writing to it at the time?
This and all arguements like it are clever little distractions, but one should remember that Linux has a nice little feature that Windows or even MacOS does not, total and complete customability. So some code is added that allows you autounmount and eject a CD from a drive just by pushing the drive button. 24 hours later, someone else adds code that makes it a script option in the automount/unmount program so you have to "manually" unmount it in a server environment. 2 weeks later, this is incorperated by yet another programmer into a nice GUI interface for one of the Window Managers, and within a month it's incorperated into all the WMs. By the end of the year, all *nix variants have it, and by second quarter of next year, there's access security built in.
Write the damned code and the users AND programmers will come!
Why three disks? The binaries plus source code are small enough to fit *6* copies on one CD.
Hey, looky there, another selling point for OpenOffice, it's tiny!
Keep in mind that once these people start learning, some of them will want to go on to more advanced stuff. Once someone learns the basics of a spreadsheet, they may want to learn some of the more advanced formulas available, or perhaps formatting techniques.
Also, those off-the-wall classes might not be as out there as you think. I'm constantly teaching my co-workers (they're bean-counters) about hacker ethics, and sometimes I can't get any actual work done because they want to know more.