I really like Gentoo's portage package system, but I hate waiting for the thing to compile everything. While there are some binary items in portage, there's way way more source-only things.
I mean if you purchase the equipment then don't you have the right to be able to use it?
Should you be able to use it? Probably. If you bought something made for Windows, knowing full well it doesn't work with Linux, and then cry that it doesn't work with Linux, you may be out of luck.
Should you be allowed to figure out how it works? Starts to get questionable from a "will I get sued" standpoint.
Should you be able to tell other people (potentially including competitors) how it works? Gets even uglier from teh "Will I get sied" standpoint.
You don't have to like the idea that some companies want to keep their source code secret, you just have to accept the reality that many such companies are more than happy to take everything you own and see you rot in jail if you discover and then publish what they want kept secret. Doesn't matter what you want. It matters what are you willing to risk to get it.
If giving away a Linux driver as open-source isn't worth the trouble, what about releasing the driver as a binary, and keep the sources to yourself? Sure, the slashdot idealists will hate me for even thinking of that, but it's another possibility that could let Linux users benefit formt his thing, and has somewhat less chance of the company taking everything you own away from you.
Some big-software products have always made be the buyer feel like a betatester. It's not quite right, but they had a deadline to meet and sold it anyway, promising to fix it later with patches and stuff. Specter's encouragment to pass this flawed bill now and fix it later approach feels much the same. Only I don't feel my software has been fixed to satisfaction, will the fixes to this borked law be any better?
I say we convince a congressman somewhere to sneak a small snippet into some must-pass law oen of these days. A snippet that would allow me once a year to show politicians what I think of their work by requiring each politician to allow me to smack them upside the head. And make a big shindig of it all, invite the press, hire a caterer, and of course all a tthe taxpayers' expense. This snippet of law would not allow anyone to back out of getting smacked. What a great way to spend one day a year, and it could be a heck of a party. National Politician Smacking Day, everybody gets off work to watch it on TV and everything.
Do you think they'd start actually reading what they vote for if something like this happened a few times?
Like I commented to a news.com story a few days ago, why are they so paranoid about component or DVI outputs? I don't know of any capture cards for these connections, so it just seems like these guys are making up fictional things to be afraid of in the really real world. I just don't get it... The news.com story specified DVI as a connection the movie industry was very concerned about for piracy reasons, but I've never heard of a DVI capture card.
I'd looked for a component input capture card a while back as I've got a few laserdiscs I'd like to convert to DVD in the best quality I can. (There's no DVD for sale of these versions of some films, the unmangled original Star Wars set for example) I didn't find one, so I don't see any reason for these shennanigans in the HD industry.
Where's my broom? I call shennanigans on these retards.
Why are so many versions of "Windows" necessary even with this nonsense?
Why does some "version" of "Windows" absolutely have to have media player included, or internet explorer included, or outlook/express included or...?
Why not just ship the core of the OS, without any applications that play videos, music, display web pages, or show emails? These applications can be had seperately. Sell them seperately, or make them availabel for free downloads. Considering we already don't "pay extra" to get media player, outlook express, or internet explorer, I dont' think it'd be hard to imagine downloading them for free from microsoft.com. They wouldn't even be in trouble for givng these away for free since firefox, thunderbird, iTunes player software, and other competing equivalents are also available as free downloads.
I honestly don't understand the mindset Microsoft has that requires some "version" of "Windows" must have a music/video player on the same CD as the OS. Or an email program on the same CD as the OS. Or a web browser on the same CD as the OS. Or... Personally, I don't want MSIE or outlook express on my PC at all, and I simply don't understand why they force me to have it, either installed to the computer or on the CD at all. If I want those things, it should be as easy to get them as it is to get Firefox or Thunderbird or whatever.
You could always get Firefox downloaded from a friend, your previous computer, buy a CD (except in UK, sic!), same for Opera and others, to install the first and only browser to a fresh "Windows" install as it may be akward to want to download a browser without a browser to download it with.
I only see good reason to have ONE version of "windows" retail package. The core OS, and no apps. Maybe a 32bit and then a 64bit package but that's still pushing the line IMHO. I never did see any reason to split Home and Pro versions. The differences I'm aware of between Home and Pro and both miniscule and ludicrous to leave out of Home. (OK, I only know that Home can't do the classic style filesharing mode with password protected access to any drive/directory instead of the global shared folder, I don't know of any other differences myself, but I do feel it unconcionable to leave this out of Home)
I thought all the anti-spam, telephone do nto call lists, junk fax laws, etc. exempted political communications and stuff from non-profit organizations...
Re:Perhaps they can make it possible to configure
on
MythTV 0.19 Released
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· Score: 1
> MythTV is a bitch to configure.
MythTV itself hasn't been that bad. I've had a terrible time with Gentoo and the pcHDTV3000 cards I've got though. I'd like to get both these cards pulling in Cable from Comcast, which is supposed to be possible, but I haven't got any channels to check out yet. There's apparently no cable equivalent of the channel scanner utils for OTA antennas, or at least I haven't found such a thing. mythsetup's channel scan doesn't work either, but it should be possible to get things working without myth. Maybe that'll be better in 0.19, but Linux is really the hard thing to get configured for me.
I had it all pretty darn close to working ho wI wanted it once before I got the HD cards, the remote worked, TV worked with a PVR-250 card, DVD ripping worked, but TV output didn't work. Before I got that up a gentoo update royally screwed the whole system and I had to reinstall from scratch to get it booting again, and have yet to get MythTV working that well again, but I've removed the PVR-250 as I wasn't happy with the picture quality coming out of it. I'm sure drivers for this card have improved a lot since then, but I no longer care.
I've been fighting with my rig for a few years now, and often take months at a time off because I get sick of it. And that's usually being sick of trying to get things working in Linux in general. My last accomplishment was to get the pcHDTV firmware loading. Now I'm on an on-again-off-again quest to learn how to tune QAM channels, for which I've found rediculously little information out there.
What about comparing the mindset of people using Firefox to the mindset of those who use MSIE? I know people who are seriously under MS't thumb, in that they simply do not care if there is any alternative and quality is completely irrelevant. They also don't care enough about the world to be careful on the web. One friend of mine (who's nearly 31 years old now) I won't let use my computer without supervision because he doesn't want to "learn how" to use Firefox, and he's often impulsively copying crap from god knows where on to my machine or other people's machines to show off the latest stupid gimmick he's found out there someplace. I don't like gimmicks off some random web page running on my PC as I'm afraid of what computer illnesses may come along for the ride...
I think that a lot of people using Firefox go beyond just having a different browser to be safer doing the exact same things. I think that the average firefox user probably has a somewhat different web surfing habit than IE users. Many are using Firefox because they sought out something "safer" than MSIE in general, and are probably actively trying to be safer in their usage as well by not doing some of the things or going to the sorts of sites that those less interested or less knowledgable are doing or going to.
Regardless of the browser in use, who is more likely to click through the bank account phishers, the average MSIE user or the average Firefox user? Things like that...
I just got my laptop with XP, just got one for my sister, and just upgraded her desktop to XP as well because she needs Office 2003 to be compatible with school which wouldnt' work on her old 98SE. We haven't got our money's worth out of XP yet, and I ain't shelling out for Vista for some time without a _very_ good reason.
Things I don't consider to be _very_ good reason: Halo2 (I've alrady become bored with my roomate's Xbox copy anyway), antivirus, better security than XP (They used the same marketing with XP and look at the weekly exploits still going around for it, I simply don't believe this line of baloney).
My sister will get it when she requires it for school. I don't know if I'll see a good reason for myself getting it unless it comes with my next laptop. As I'd like to get some use out of my new laptop, that won't be for a few years. It won't come with my next desktop, as I don't buy complete systems for that.
Tieing Halo 2 to a Windows upgrade purchase pisses me off, and only motivates be to avoid both as much as possible.
I only know onw person using Photoshop on a Mac, but he's in the graphics design biz. I know a lot of everyday PC users who use "photoshop" as a verb when they need to edit a photo, remove the two-finger bunny ears, redeye, etc. These aren't Macheads or Linux geeks, these are average PC users.
I've used gimp a little. More accurately, I've tried to use gimp a little. I wasn't very successful, and I wanted to do some extremely basic stuff like make a jpeg with some text in it. I couldn't figure out how to crop off extra margins around the text I managed to create. In trying to place a couple lines of text, it kept doing weird things and one of the lines was sortof faded, as if it was stuck in some mode I didn't understand or know how to get out of. Granted, I didn't read any howtos or anything, but it was such a stupidly simple thing that would have been extremely easy in MS Paint, but I only have a Solaris box at work and I learned to hate the gimp.
I've never used Photoshop myself at all. If it's as hard to figure out such a simple thing as it was in gimp, then I don't want to. For the love of god I hope it's more intuitive than gimp is. For myself, given the choice between gimp and some other tool I've never used before, I'll take the one I'v enever used before, as I already know I'm not productive with gimp.
Might gimpshop be the answer? Possibly. It's not as easy as "emerge gimpshop" though, so for my home linux box I'm probably too lazy and will just boot into Windows and use paint, or use an old Amiga program I like, and at work I'm pretty much screwed but luckily I don't have to deal with such things at work very often.
It doesn't matter how powerful or what feature set gimp has. Often average-joe business types get the final say, and if they can't get gimp, then they won't sign off on it. If they're accustomed to Photoshop, that's what they'll prefer to stick with. If I was a businessman, I'd prefer to avoid gimp based on my personal experience with it so far. Photoshop is a big brand name that will of course be in demand.
I think a better idea than trying to convert Photoshop users to gimp is to get Photoshop well supported in Wine. Maybe it already is. Get a good IT guy to deal with supporting it as surely Adobe won't, and the users can have their favorite tool, and businessmen can choose Linux while keeping with the big graphics brand.
I wouldn't mind seeing the current class of patents see their terms reduced. Considering how many patents are made by those with no intention whatsoever of producing or selling their own invention, but they do it only for the lawsuit income, and also considering the current pace of advencements as well as how some areas of technology are artificially hindered by patent politics, I think technology in general would benefit from a shorter patent term today.
If someone has a truely beneficial idea, but either cannot afford patent license fees or the patent holder is absolute in their denial even if the new idea comes from a very rich inventor, then you have to wait around a number of years for anyone to benefit from such an idea. I'd like to reduce my wait, thanks.
I understand why patents were created way back when, but they've flipped-flopped from being a protection and encouragement of innovation of yesteryear to a hinderance to innovation today. I'm not saying we should get rid of patents completely, but only to adjust things to work better with today's potential pace of advancements.
Re:Well they will keep doing stuff like this until
on
Is Verizon a Network Hog?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, to some extent there is no one to switch to. If I want DSL, Verizon is involved. If I want landline telephone, Verizon is involved. OK, dump landline and go cellular. Uh, from what my friends and roommates tell me, Verizon is the only service that works at my house. I don't want one I can't use... VOIP? I don't trust the only other broadband provider's connection is reliable enough to trust with my phone service. If my roommate can't play FFXI because the connection keeps dropping every few minutes, then I don't expect it to make a good phone line either.
It it even possible to boycott your regional BellCo without going Amish? Naw, I think Verizon has enough people like me screwed out of any possible alternative that they don't have to care. A lot of unhappy customers simply have nowhere else to go.
BTW, I'm considering changing to DSL instead of cablemodem because of the piss-poor service I currently have, I'm considering getting a Verizon cell phone (I don't currently have any cellphone), and I would like FIOS if it was available here. I currently have Verizon land-line and nothing else from them.
The provisions of the FCPA prohibit the bribery of foreign government officials by U.S. citizens and prescribe accounting and record-keeping practices. Opponents of the law said it would severely restrict the ability of U.S. companies to compete in many countries where bribery was part of the commercial fabric.
So, it's OK when you do it at home because then it's called "lobbying" you politicians instead of bribery, but you can't do the same thing on the other side of some phantom line in the ground because then it's called "bribery"? Neat.
"The courts recognize that parties are entitled to make a copy of a work for use as evidence in possible future proceedings,"
Hmmm. OK. I'm going to make a backup copy of all my DVDs, but not for the purpose of protecting them from kids, being dropped, or other potential abuses that cold ruin them. I'm going to copy them for the purpose of the copies being used as evidence in some possible future legal proceedings. Hey, if they find out I copied aa DVD and sue me for it, surely this copy will be used by them against me as evidence in court proceedings, no? Does it matter that it's evidence for or against me, so long as its evidence of some kind? A possible loophole?? Bwaahaahaa!
The story was phrased in such a way that would easily make a technologically naive reader go "Wow, he 'hacked into' the military, so evil", but in reality, it was probably all done by his software.
If they wanted to make him a poster child for why not to hack the military, they probably could have thrown the Patriot Act at him, called him an enemy combatant instead of a criminal, thrown him in jail someplace and forget about him and no one would ever see him again...
So it won't be legal for someone to write a media player for someone else's media content that comes with DRM, and release this media player under GPL3? Sure, other licenses can be used for such things, but now such projects cannot benefit from other aspects of GPL3.
FTA: "It's the shipping business of the digital age," Smith said, arguing that consumers should welcome the pay-for-delivery concept.
Like many others, I also am already paying what I see as the digital equivalent of a shipping fee. Comcast takes $45/month from me in return for my ability to receive data from web content providers.
After Amazon charges me for shipping ona package I ordered from them, does the shipping company go back and charge Amazon again seperate from what I myself have already paid above the cost for the items inside the package? Or is the shipping charge only paid once in total there?
>Bill Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth justified >content charging companies by saying they are using the telco's >network without paying for it.
I thought the internet service customer was the one paying for use of the vendor's network?? As in, I as a Comcast cablemodem customer am paying for use of Comcast's network. Comcast's product that I am buying from them is the ability to access Google, hotmail, webmd, or whoever's web sites I care to look at.
It sounds like they're wanting to double-charge for a single service. Kindof like if Walmart decided to charge me for the DVD, and also charge the movie producers for the right to have their DVD sold in Walmart's store.
I've heard rumors that Verizon may be considering this policy as well while I've been asking around about DSL and FIOS. If they pull a prank like this, I may stick with Comcast, even though I'm relatively unhappy with their service's reliability in my case.
Sure, people have said this for ages. And people have also said for ages that Apple will or should switch to x86. I'll believe that when I, oh, wait a minute.... Could this mean, that I as an AMD fan might oneday take the idea of buying from Dell seriously?
I upgraded my sister's desktop for Christmas with a new motherboard and CPU, keeping as much as I could from the old K63-450 like the graphics, network and sound cards. It had 98SE on it, which was discovered to not be capable of doing iTunes or her new Shuffle, or MS Office 2003 she needs for grad school. (Compatibility with the 2003 in the labs and professor's machines and all that...) So we picked up an XP Home upgrade as well.
Most everything went well. Except for the SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 card. XP doesn't seem to want to recognize it's there. It worked in 98SE fine. But I can't get it to want to install drivers from CD, it keeps saying there's no harware isntalled for the driver to work with and the installer exits out.
Argh!
I have to download a driver update to try and mail her a CD because the thing was too huge for her dialup to get. It made it to 89% of 40some megs and died. What the heck makes a driver download for a sound card that big?
We never complained about Playstation1, Dreamcast or Gamecube not being able to read each others' game disk media, and for PS3 or Xbox360 games I really don't care what media format they use. I don't expect to try and read an Xbox game in a PS3 or vice-versa.
But I'm really not looking forward to trying to explain to people next Christmas how to buy the right thing for movies on my list. It's bad enough now between full-screen and widescreen formats, Of all the movies I got only one was my preferred widescreen format. One person said that there was no widescreen version of Fantastic4. OK, maybe Walmart doesn't sell both versions of every single title, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, picture grandma looking at 4 boxes on the shelf for the same title, DVD full-screen, DVD widescreen, Blueray and HD-DVD. What are the statistics that you'll get the right one in that case? I recently saw something about the high-def formats providing image data in the disk's native resolution of 720P or 1080i. Does that mean there will be two HD-DVD versions as well, and take the number of versions of each title to 5?
At least for TV series DVDs they're nearly all only full-screen and you can't get those wrong. Maybe that'll change next Christmas as well.
At this point, I really don't even care to buy movies anymore.
(For those non-Christians, no offense. search/replace my holiday with some gift-giving tradition of your own)
>It works on all the major platforms including the Mac which IE won't support anymore
They say that as if Microsoft might want to support other platforms. IE works on Mac but they're tossing that out, so why would they buy another browser for that reason?
Nah, the only reason MS would buy Opera would be to lock it in a dumpster somewhere, never to be seen again.
Slashdot Mirror
I really like Gentoo's portage package system, but I hate waiting for the thing to compile everything. While there are some binary items in portage, there's way way more source-only things.
you can't scream libel no matter how hard you try, you can only scream slander
If someone in the woods screams "libel" does it not make a sound?
Will pencils break and keyboards fail if someone tries to write "sadlren"?
I mean if you purchase the equipment then don't you have the right to be able to use it?
Should you be able to use it? Probably. If you bought something made for Windows, knowing full well it doesn't work with Linux, and then cry that it doesn't work with Linux, you may be out of luck.
Should you be allowed to figure out how it works? Starts to get questionable from a "will I get sued" standpoint.
Should you be able to tell other people (potentially including competitors) how it works? Gets even uglier from teh "Will I get sied" standpoint.
You don't have to like the idea that some companies want to keep their source code secret, you just have to accept the reality that many such companies are more than happy to take everything you own and see you rot in jail if you discover and then publish what they want kept secret. Doesn't matter what you want. It matters what are you willing to risk to get it.
If giving away a Linux driver as open-source isn't worth the trouble, what about releasing the driver as a binary, and keep the sources to yourself? Sure, the slashdot idealists will hate me for even thinking of that, but it's another possibility that could let Linux users benefit formt his thing, and has somewhat less chance of the company taking everything you own away from you.
Some big-software products have always made be the buyer feel like a betatester. It's not quite right, but they had a deadline to meet and sold it anyway, promising to fix it later with patches and stuff. Specter's encouragment to pass this flawed bill now and fix it later approach feels much the same. Only I don't feel my software has been fixed to satisfaction, will the fixes to this borked law be any better?
I say we convince a congressman somewhere to sneak a small snippet into some must-pass law oen of these days. A snippet that would allow me once a year to show politicians what I think of their work by requiring each politician to allow me to smack them upside the head. And make a big shindig of it all, invite the press, hire a caterer, and of course all a tthe taxpayers' expense. This snippet of law would not allow anyone to back out of getting smacked. What a great way to spend one day a year, and it could be a heck of a party. National Politician Smacking Day, everybody gets off work to watch it on TV and everything.
Do you think they'd start actually reading what they vote for if something like this happened a few times?
Like I commented to a news.com story a few days ago, why are they so paranoid about component or DVI outputs? I don't know of any capture cards for these connections, so it just seems like these guys are making up fictional things to be afraid of in the really real world. I just don't get it... The news.com story specified DVI as a connection the movie industry was very concerned about for piracy reasons, but I've never heard of a DVI capture card.
I'd looked for a component input capture card a while back as I've got a few laserdiscs I'd like to convert to DVD in the best quality I can. (There's no DVD for sale of these versions of some films, the unmangled original Star Wars set for example) I didn't find one, so I don't see any reason for these shennanigans in the HD industry.
Where's my broom? I call shennanigans on these retards.
Why are so many versions of "Windows" necessary even with this nonsense?
Why does some "version" of "Windows" absolutely have to have media player included, or internet explorer included, or outlook/express included or...?
Why not just ship the core of the OS, without any applications that play videos, music, display web pages, or show emails? These applications can be had seperately. Sell them seperately, or make them availabel for free downloads. Considering we already don't "pay extra" to get media player, outlook express, or internet explorer, I dont' think it'd be hard to imagine downloading them for free from microsoft.com. They wouldn't even be in trouble for givng these away for free since firefox, thunderbird, iTunes player software, and other competing equivalents are also available as free downloads.
I honestly don't understand the mindset Microsoft has that requires some "version" of "Windows" must have a music/video player on the same CD as the OS. Or an email program on the same CD as the OS. Or a web browser on the same CD as the OS. Or... Personally, I don't want MSIE or outlook express on my PC at all, and I simply don't understand why they force me to have it, either installed to the computer or on the CD at all. If I want those things, it should be as easy to get them as it is to get Firefox or Thunderbird or whatever.
You could always get Firefox downloaded from a friend, your previous computer, buy a CD (except in UK, sic!), same for Opera and others, to install the first and only browser to a fresh "Windows" install as it may be akward to want to download a browser without a browser to download it with.
I only see good reason to have ONE version of "windows" retail package. The core OS, and no apps. Maybe a 32bit and then a 64bit package but that's still pushing the line IMHO. I never did see any reason to split Home and Pro versions. The differences I'm aware of between Home and Pro and both miniscule and ludicrous to leave out of Home. (OK, I only know that Home can't do the classic style filesharing mode with password protected access to any drive/directory instead of the global shared folder, I don't know of any other differences myself, but I do feel it unconcionable to leave this out of Home)
> It looks like the cached copy on Google will be the copy submitted in court.
In addition to that, is there any mention of HDCP-ready on the retail packaging?
I thought all the anti-spam, telephone do nto call lists, junk fax laws, etc. exempted political communications and stuff from non-profit organizations...
> MythTV is a bitch to configure.
MythTV itself hasn't been that bad. I've had a terrible time with Gentoo and the pcHDTV3000 cards I've got though. I'd like to get both these cards pulling in Cable from Comcast, which is supposed to be possible, but I haven't got any channels to check out yet. There's apparently no cable equivalent of the channel scanner utils for OTA antennas, or at least I haven't found such a thing. mythsetup's channel scan doesn't work either, but it should be possible to get things working without myth. Maybe that'll be better in 0.19, but Linux is really the hard thing to get configured for me.
I had it all pretty darn close to working ho wI wanted it once before I got the HD cards, the remote worked, TV worked with a PVR-250 card, DVD ripping worked, but TV output didn't work. Before I got that up a gentoo update royally screwed the whole system and I had to reinstall from scratch to get it booting again, and have yet to get MythTV working that well again, but I've removed the PVR-250 as I wasn't happy with the picture quality coming out of it. I'm sure drivers for this card have improved a lot since then, but I no longer care.
I've been fighting with my rig for a few years now, and often take months at a time off because I get sick of it. And that's usually being sick of trying to get things working in Linux in general. My last accomplishment was to get the pcHDTV firmware loading. Now I'm on an on-again-off-again quest to learn how to tune QAM channels, for which I've found rediculously little information out there.
What about comparing the mindset of people using Firefox to the mindset of those who use MSIE? I know people who are seriously under MS't thumb, in that they simply do not care if there is any alternative and quality is completely irrelevant. They also don't care enough about the world to be careful on the web. One friend of mine (who's nearly 31 years old now) I won't let use my computer without supervision because he doesn't want to "learn how" to use Firefox, and he's often impulsively copying crap from god knows where on to my machine or other people's machines to show off the latest stupid gimmick he's found out there someplace. I don't like gimmicks off some random web page running on my PC as I'm afraid of what computer illnesses may come along for the ride...
I think that a lot of people using Firefox go beyond just having a different browser to be safer doing the exact same things. I think that the average firefox user probably has a somewhat different web surfing habit than IE users. Many are using Firefox because they sought out something "safer" than MSIE in general, and are probably actively trying to be safer in their usage as well by not doing some of the things or going to the sorts of sites that those less interested or less knowledgable are doing or going to.
Regardless of the browser in use, who is more likely to click through the bank account phishers, the average MSIE user or the average Firefox user? Things like that...
I just got my laptop with XP, just got one for my sister, and just upgraded her desktop to XP as well because she needs Office 2003 to be compatible with school which wouldnt' work on her old 98SE. We haven't got our money's worth out of XP yet, and I ain't shelling out for Vista for some time without a _very_ good reason.
Things I don't consider to be _very_ good reason: Halo2 (I've alrady become bored with my roomate's Xbox copy anyway), antivirus, better security than XP (They used the same marketing with XP and look at the weekly exploits still going around for it, I simply don't believe this line of baloney).
My sister will get it when she requires it for school. I don't know if I'll see a good reason for myself getting it unless it comes with my next laptop. As I'd like to get some use out of my new laptop, that won't be for a few years. It won't come with my next desktop, as I don't buy complete systems for that.
Tieing Halo 2 to a Windows upgrade purchase pisses me off, and only motivates be to avoid both as much as possible.
I only know onw person using Photoshop on a Mac, but he's in the graphics design biz. I know a lot of everyday PC users who use "photoshop" as a verb when they need to edit a photo, remove the two-finger bunny ears, redeye, etc. These aren't Macheads or Linux geeks, these are average PC users.
I've used gimp a little. More accurately, I've tried to use gimp a little. I wasn't very successful, and I wanted to do some extremely basic stuff like make a jpeg with some text in it. I couldn't figure out how to crop off extra margins around the text I managed to create. In trying to place a couple lines of text, it kept doing weird things and one of the lines was sortof faded, as if it was stuck in some mode I didn't understand or know how to get out of. Granted, I didn't read any howtos or anything, but it was such a stupidly simple thing that would have been extremely easy in MS Paint, but I only have a Solaris box at work and I learned to hate the gimp.
I've never used Photoshop myself at all. If it's as hard to figure out such a simple thing as it was in gimp, then I don't want to. For the love of god I hope it's more intuitive than gimp is. For myself, given the choice between gimp and some other tool I've never used before, I'll take the one I'v enever used before, as I already know I'm not productive with gimp.
Might gimpshop be the answer? Possibly. It's not as easy as "emerge gimpshop" though, so for my home linux box I'm probably too lazy and will just boot into Windows and use paint, or use an old Amiga program I like, and at work I'm pretty much screwed but luckily I don't have to deal with such things at work very often.
It doesn't matter how powerful or what feature set gimp has. Often average-joe business types get the final say, and if they can't get gimp, then they won't sign off on it. If they're accustomed to Photoshop, that's what they'll prefer to stick with. If I was a businessman, I'd prefer to avoid gimp based on my personal experience with it so far. Photoshop is a big brand name that will of course be in demand.
I think a better idea than trying to convert Photoshop users to gimp is to get Photoshop well supported in Wine. Maybe it already is. Get a good IT guy to deal with supporting it as surely Adobe won't, and the users can have their favorite tool, and businessmen can choose Linux while keeping with the big graphics brand.
I wouldn't mind seeing the current class of patents see their terms reduced. Considering how many patents are made by those with no intention whatsoever of producing or selling their own invention, but they do it only for the lawsuit income, and also considering the current pace of advencements as well as how some areas of technology are artificially hindered by patent politics, I think technology in general would benefit from a shorter patent term today.
If someone has a truely beneficial idea, but either cannot afford patent license fees or the patent holder is absolute in their denial even if the new idea comes from a very rich inventor, then you have to wait around a number of years for anyone to benefit from such an idea. I'd like to reduce my wait, thanks.
I understand why patents were created way back when, but they've flipped-flopped from being a protection and encouragement of innovation of yesteryear to a hinderance to innovation today. I'm not saying we should get rid of patents completely, but only to adjust things to work better with today's potential pace of advancements.
Well, to some extent there is no one to switch to. If I want DSL, Verizon is involved. If I want landline telephone, Verizon is involved. OK, dump landline and go cellular. Uh, from what my friends and roommates tell me, Verizon is the only service that works at my house. I don't want one I can't use... VOIP? I don't trust the only other broadband provider's connection is reliable enough to trust with my phone service. If my roommate can't play FFXI because the connection keeps dropping every few minutes, then I don't expect it to make a good phone line either.
It it even possible to boycott your regional BellCo without going Amish? Naw, I think Verizon has enough people like me screwed out of any possible alternative that they don't have to care. A lot of unhappy customers simply have nowhere else to go.
BTW, I'm considering changing to DSL instead of cablemodem because of the piss-poor service I currently have, I'm considering getting a Verizon cell phone (I don't currently have any cellphone), and I would like FIOS if it was available here. I currently have Verizon land-line and nothing else from them.
The provisions of the FCPA prohibit the bribery of foreign government officials by U.S. citizens and prescribe accounting and record-keeping practices. Opponents of the law said it would severely restrict the ability of U.S. companies to compete in many countries where bribery was part of the commercial fabric.
So, it's OK when you do it at home because then it's called "lobbying" you politicians instead of bribery, but you can't do the same thing on the other side of some phantom line in the ground because then it's called "bribery"? Neat.
"The courts recognize that parties are entitled to make a copy of a work for use as evidence in possible future proceedings,"
Hmmm. OK. I'm going to make a backup copy of all my DVDs, but not for the purpose of protecting them from kids, being dropped, or other potential abuses that cold ruin them. I'm going to copy them for the purpose of the copies being used as evidence in some possible future legal proceedings. Hey, if they find out I copied aa DVD and sue me for it, surely this copy will be used by them against me as evidence in court proceedings, no? Does it matter that it's evidence for or against me, so long as its evidence of some kind? A possible loophole?? Bwaahaahaa!
The story was phrased in such a way that would easily make a technologically naive reader go "Wow, he 'hacked into' the military, so evil", but in reality, it was probably all done by his software.
If they wanted to make him a poster child for why not to hack the military, they probably could have thrown the Patriot Act at him, called him an enemy combatant instead of a criminal, thrown him in jail someplace and forget about him and no one would ever see him again...
So it won't be legal for someone to write a media player for someone else's media content that comes with DRM, and release this media player under GPL3? Sure, other licenses can be used for such things, but now such projects cannot benefit from other aspects of GPL3.
FTA: "It's the shipping business of the digital age," Smith said, arguing that consumers should welcome the pay-for-delivery concept.
Like many others, I also am already paying what I see as the digital equivalent of a shipping fee. Comcast takes $45/month from me in return for my ability to receive data from web content providers.
After Amazon charges me for shipping ona package I ordered from them, does the shipping company go back and charge Amazon again seperate from what I myself have already paid above the cost for the items inside the package? Or is the shipping charge only paid once in total there?
>Bill Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth justified
>content charging companies by saying they are using the telco's
>network without paying for it.
I thought the internet service customer was the one paying for use of the vendor's network?? As in, I as a Comcast cablemodem customer am paying for use of Comcast's network. Comcast's product that I am buying from them is the ability to access Google, hotmail, webmd, or whoever's web sites I care to look at.
It sounds like they're wanting to double-charge for a single service. Kindof like if Walmart decided to charge me for the DVD, and also charge the movie producers for the right to have their DVD sold in Walmart's store.
I've heard rumors that Verizon may be considering this policy as well while I've been asking around about DSL and FIOS. If they pull a prank like this, I may stick with Comcast, even though I'm relatively unhappy with their service's reliability in my case.
Sure, people have said this for ages. And people have also said for ages that Apple will or should switch to x86. I'll believe that when I, oh, wait a minute.... Could this mean, that I as an AMD fan might oneday take the idea of buying from Dell seriously?
I upgraded my sister's desktop for Christmas with a new motherboard and CPU, keeping as much as I could from the old K63-450 like the graphics, network and sound cards. It had 98SE on it, which was discovered to not be capable of doing iTunes or her new Shuffle, or MS Office 2003 she needs for grad school. (Compatibility with the 2003 in the labs and professor's machines and all that...) So we picked up an XP Home upgrade as well.
Most everything went well. Except for the SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 card. XP doesn't seem to want to recognize it's there. It worked in 98SE fine. But I can't get it to want to install drivers from CD, it keeps saying there's no harware isntalled for the driver to work with and the installer exits out.
Argh!
I have to download a driver update to try and mail her a CD because the thing was too huge for her dialup to get. It made it to 89% of 40some megs and died. What the heck makes a driver download for a sound card that big?
We never complained about Playstation1, Dreamcast or Gamecube not being able to read each others' game disk media, and for PS3 or Xbox360 games I really don't care what media format they use. I don't expect to try and read an Xbox game in a PS3 or vice-versa.
But I'm really not looking forward to trying to explain to people next Christmas how to buy the right thing for movies on my list. It's bad enough now between full-screen and widescreen formats, Of all the movies I got only one was my preferred widescreen format. One person said that there was no widescreen version of Fantastic4. OK, maybe Walmart doesn't sell both versions of every single title, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, picture grandma looking at 4 boxes on the shelf for the same title, DVD full-screen, DVD widescreen, Blueray and HD-DVD. What are the statistics that you'll get the right one in that case? I recently saw something about the high-def formats providing image data in the disk's native resolution of 720P or 1080i. Does that mean there will be two HD-DVD versions as well, and take the number of versions of each title to 5?
At least for TV series DVDs they're nearly all only full-screen and you can't get those wrong. Maybe that'll change next Christmas as well.
At this point, I really don't even care to buy movies anymore.
(For those non-Christians, no offense. search/replace my holiday with some gift-giving tradition of your own)
>It works on all the major platforms including the Mac which IE won't support anymore
They say that as if Microsoft might want to support other platforms. IE works on Mac but they're tossing that out, so why would they buy another browser for that reason?
Nah, the only reason MS would buy Opera would be to lock it in a dumpster somewhere, never to be seen again.