I think it's less that it's from Apple, and more that it's clean, it's simple, it works well and without fuss, it arranges everything to be as smooth and easy as possible for you, and most importantly, the entire thing from mp3 player to music store to portable music player is just one seamlessly, effortlessly integrated product...
That's Microsoft's big point of obsession, isn't it?
I mean, yes, it certainly is nice that Microsoft is managing to implement this specific OS feature before Apple or the Linux community does, and they should get a gold star for Super Effort, but still.
If this were the "holy grail", wouldn't people have cared a lot more about it when BeOS did it ten years ago?
I find it amusing Microsoft has now for years been harping on this one SQL-drive feature in an OS that keeps getting pushed back and back. I guess it's because it's the only thing Microsoft has done in a long time that actually seems like innovation, since it's never been done before in an OS that most people have heard of.
Last but definitely not least, go short 2,953,000 SCOX in the open market. (They don't tell you this part)
It has been repeatedly claimed on slashdot that SCO stock is so frequently shorted that there are almost no available shares left to short. How is BayStar going to find 2,953,000 shares to short?
If BayStar's motives here are so obvious that they become clear to you and a couple other people on slashdot immediately just because you've got some financial knowledge, isn't this going to occur to a LOT of people in the financial world as well? If so, aren't then the speculators who bought SCO's stock going to go "holy shit, Baystar's massively shorting SCO, this must mean things are going down" and dump all their currently-still-high-priced SCO promptly, hurting the price? If no such general reaction and price hurt happens, what does this say about the "BayStar's shorting everything they just bought" theory?
In this case, they are giving the money to a charity. The only difference is that in this case, the charity is not a licensed nonprofit, and the beneficiary is not a bunch of starving children. The beneficiary of this charity is Microsoft.
If you give $50 million to a small cancer research lab, maybe they will find a cure for cancer. If they do achieve this, the payback will be absolutely massive, since, hey, you've got a cure for cancer. The chances this will happen are almost nonexistent. However, the chances are still indescribably greater than the chances there will be a large payback in the SCO case. Even taking seriously the idea there would be a sizeable payback in the SCO case displays an almost willful ignorance of the law and situation.
_____ The "big payoff" I assume everyone keeps referring to is that the courts will accept SCO's definition of "derivative work", in which case SCO owns fully literally every popular commercial operating system made since 1980 except for QNX and versions of the Mac OS earlier than 10.0. Besides this being logically absurd-- there is no way that if the UNIX intellectual properties were worth *that* much, that Caldera would have been able to buy them from Novell in the first place (both becuase Novell would not have sold it for an amount of money Caldera would have been able to buy, and because Caldera would not have had any money at all since Linux, where Caldera got that money from, would not have been possible)-- it is completely at odds with the way copyright as regards computer programs has been interpreted in every other instance ever. The alternate "big payoff" would come from some kind of "time bomb" propeitary code that someone at some point slipped into Linux unnoticed, which might at one point have gotten a small sum for SCO, but given that 1) the infringement on all parts except the initial person who inserted that code into linux was unintentional and 2) SCO has made no effort whatsoever to mitigate the damage done to them by this, SCO has destroyed any hope they might have had of getting significant money by this method.
The only possibilities are that SCO will recieve some small number of damages from the entry of code they own into the linux codebase-- code which will be, upon its disclosure, promptly removed-- or they will find some kind of minor "gotcha!" loophole in a contract with IBM by which IBM owes them money. This will not be a significant amount of money. Moreover, by their irresponsible and damaging public actions and statements while hyping this trial, SCO has opened themselves up to various countersuits-- for libel, for deceptive trade practices, for making various sorts of threats-- from many parties not at all involved in their initial IBM suit. Any money SCO gets from the paltry possibilities they have left will be dwarfed by the likely legal costs, as well as the money they may wind up owing from these suits. Moreover, once that money comes in, they will promptly cease to have any revenue strategy and their projected revenue will drop to zero.
This is why Ballmer wants security experts to "just shut up" about security problems in MS products.
How are they supposed to keep their "fixed in 24 hours" record going if they have to count from the point at which the exploit is discovered and in the wild, rather than from the point at which Microsoft decides to actually admit the vulnerability exists?
"How does Microsoft change a light bulb?" "They don't, they just redefine darkness as the new standard for light"...
Audio is fairly memory-expensive, and on top of simply playing the mp3s (which if i am right it does through quicktime-- not exactly the MOST memory-efficient thing out there) it has to do a decent amount of buffering with the audio. It does this both when simultaneously playing and downloading over the network, and when using this feature (the fade-between-tracks thing).
I know there are a couple different versions. If it doesn't work with the standard Wine it would be interesting to see if someone using the TransGaming version had better luck.
Also: do you have quicktime installed? Does quicktime even work with Wine? I suspect iTunes may not work without it.
I would love to test this myself, but my linux box is kind of in pieces on the floor at the moment, and I have yet to get around to emerging or testing wine..
If they'd actually sent out any of the invoices, they could have been prosecuted for wire fraud. Which is, of course, why they didn't. The phantom "invoices" were just a trick to get people to think that there was something to this, and trick people into coming to SCO preemptively.
However, given that: Is SCO violating any kind of fraud/barratry laws by claiming they were going to send out these invoices, then not doing it? (At least given that the claim was clearly a way of tricking people into "voluntarily" giving up money?) Any at all? Just checking..
What on earth happened to the Space Exploration Act of 2003? That was the most exciting piece of news I've heard this year, and I haven't heard a word about it since it was introduced. What happened to it? Did it quietly drift into oblivion? Did it stall in committee? Is it dead yet, is it ever going to get to a vote?
HR 3057 was a coherent, realistic, and bold plan to revamp America's space program by setting it on an actual schedule with goals, and taking its focus away from "get into space and then come back" and toward doing actual interesting, forward-looking, long-term things, like developing intraorbital craft, setting up construction sites at Lagrange points, setting up research centers on celestial bodies, etc. It was well-designed, had provisions to ensure the schedule was stuck to, and could work. Where did it go?
Does anyone know what a good place is to check up on the status of introduced bills, since the general media seems to think the actual functioning of our government so hideously boring as to be beneath mention ever?
This might not actually work, but why don't you try writing a nice letter/email/petition to the people who make the Action Replay (it's kind of like Game Genie for PS2) and ask them to write some codes for Disagea and some other games to aid color-blind players? Changing color palettes seems like the kind of thing the Action Replay could be made to do with ease.
It is worth a shot, at least, perhaps, and it would be interesting to see their response..
If that is the case, that is the fault of the engineers, not of the FSF.
If the engineers went with linux without fully reporting to their overseers what the consequences of extending and selling as a commercial product Linux would be, they are guilty of almost criminal incompetence. They, or the overseers who okayed extending linux rather than looking for other options without being willing to accept the consequences of doing so, are be the ones who should be villified here, not the FSF.
The Internet may be an International Resource, but copyright varies wildly from country to country, and the copyrights and distribution rights for music, in particular, tend to be owned by completely different entities depending on which country you're in.
If Apple releases an x86 OS X, the chances are it will NOT be a product you can walk to the store, buy in a box, and install on your current PC. First off, the margins are relatively slim on software OSes. Apple hardware is so expensive BECAUSE it's subsidizing the production of OS X. To survive as software, Apple would have to charge prices people wouldn't pay for software. Much more importantly, though, the fact apple has a working "x86" OS X in the lab doesn't mean they have an x86 OS they can sell. The "PC" hardware world is simply massive. At the time Windows 95 was released, the press was saying that more than half the code in W95 was hardware compatibility. Apple does not have the resources to spend huge amounts of time supporting and debugging every sound card, video card, joystick card, etc, in the universe.
Moreover, once you have this x86 OS X, what will you run on it? All the OS X software in the world would have to be compiled specifically for your x86 OS. Apple would have to convince ALL its developers to recompile and spend forevermore having to clumsily offer dual downloads/distributions of EVERYTHING based on target chip. There goes a big portion of the "it just works"-ness of OS X. Moreover some developers might refuse to compile for OS X out of spite. Apple could alternately try to create some kind of wine-like layer to let os x/x86 run windows software, which would be extremely costly and take away most of the "mac experience" feel of using the OS.
If Apple did release their x86 OS X, it would most likely just be the same as today-- premium boxes based on commodity PC hardware parts, but in a shiny apple-branded case and with a high price tag. The only reason for this would be if for some reason they could put PC hardware together so much cheaper than PPC hardware it would justify the difficult switchover. (It is unlikely the price savings would be THAT much.) That would be about the only difference. But if they did this, they lose almost all of their justification for CHARGING their high prices in the first place-- you're no longer buying some kind of "special" apple box, you're buying a PC that just happens to be more expensive because it has a shiny case and can run OS X. Since the boxes would still be expensive, this would mean that you would lose the ENTIRE thing that all of you PC people clamoring for an x86 OS X want [Mac OS X on a $500 computer].
"But wait", you say, "if apple were selling x86 computers, they could open up the hardware for cloning, or people could build their own, thus meaning the prices would be cheap again!" Well, no. Apple can do this just as easily while still using the PPC. Moreover, Apple has tried this with the PPC already. It didn't work. The other clone vendors, not having to use their money on R&D and developing the Mac OS, undercut Apple's prices and took away all of Apple's sales in the high-end, high-margin area. Apple lost a lot of money during the cloning experiment.
Apple is making money with their current scheme. It is questionable whether Apple could make money after changing the scheme to "something x86-based". The only x86 strategy that would significantly make more money than Apple's current strategy would be selling boxed OSes, which would be risky since it would require apple to drop their per-sale margins and spend massive amounts of time and resources on supporting the myriad of x86 hardware.
Since the crooks and social deviants don't have any way whatsoever other than that page to find out about Microsoft's internet vulnerabilities.
Anyway, IE is too much a part of our lives for it be easy for us to know exactly what risks we are exposing ourselves to by using it. Enough negative PR is enough.
The market is so damn volatile these days that you cannot use it as evidence unless it could be proven that the accused performed actions specifically to manipulate the market.
Although I suspect that if this company released a product based on technology so obviously easy to circumvent that it could be disabled by holding down the shift key or using a non-Microsoft OS, and their stock dropped 20% as a result, their SHAREHOLDERS could quite likely sue the COMPANY for the horrible negligence of not realizing before shipping that their product did not work.
Am I right here? I'm not sure.
No one should have CD Autorun turned on anyway; it's a good vector for viruses. There have been so few Macintosh viruses in the last ten years you could count them on one hand, but the biggest one was a worm that spread ENTIRELY by copying itself into the Autorun space every time you made a CD or CD disk image on an infected machine. (This led to a hilarious incident in which apparently a number of copies of the Marilyn Manson Enhanced CD album "Mechanical Animals" were actually shipped infected with the CD autorun virus. Though this may have just been a rumor.)
If Linux goes away, they suddenly have a market again.
The funny thing is, not even that is the case. If Linux goes away people will switch to BSD. I talked to people who've administrated SCO UNIX before this whole lawsuit mess started. As far as messy, user-unfriendly, behind-the-times propeitary unices go, it is the worst.
If every free OS in the world were somehow sued out of existence, people would flock to Solaris/x86 en masse before they'd even consider SCO UNIX.
The government is not necessarily the problem. The government is one possible source of control over your life. But only one. In America, at this point, corporations are more likely to be imposing on your freedoms than the government. The government has certain statutory limitations that still stand on what it's allowed to do to a private citizen, and the government has some tiny amount of accountability to the people since the people can exert a certain amount of influence by voting. Businesses, however, do not share these limitations, and people these days spend far more time interacting with businesses than they do interacting with their government.
OK, so we're at a point where anyone in this bar network can get the information on who's been drinking in the bars in this town. Now let's say, as a random aside, after a couple years, a small subsidiary of Time Warner just happens to buy one of these bars. Now let's say that two or so years later, you happen to be working for Time Warner, and your boss calls you in, looking at something on your personell file on the company intranet, and wanting to know why it is that the BarWatch statistics program is showing that you were in area bars for 35 hours this weekend when your project is two weeks behind schedule. Couldn't that time have been better spent on unpaid overtime...?
Or perhaps there will come a time in three years when you don't make rent, and your landlord simply promptly hands that debt off to a collection agency becuase that's an easy way of dealing with it. And all of a sudden when you swipe your drivers license at a bar, the bar, which has a certain complex deal with the credit union, is denying you entrance unless you pay the $200 that the computer says you owe to CCAA local #223..
These scenarios do not seem terribly realistic. However, it is definitely plausible. And a year ago, when slashdot was running the story that bars had started swiping drivers licenses instead of just looking at them, the people saying "THEY'LL JUST USE THIS TO TRACK YOU NEXT!" did not seem very realistic at all.
There's somehow this idea floating around that only the government wants to control you. This is a silly way to look at things. Anywhere in human social interactions that power collects is a source of danger.
All seek to enslave you, and I've already got this ravenous beast of plaster to deal with.
Eventually, SCO sold off its OS division, the one that made SCO UNIX and coincidentally happened at the time to own the original Unix copyrights (having bought them from Novell in 1995), to Caldera, a linux company. The remainder of what used to be SCO, the part Caldera didn't buy, is still operating under the name Tarantella.
Caldera, after buying SCO UNIX, changed its name to "The SCO Group." SCO doesn't stand for anything here. It's just "The SCO Group". Shortly after this the company's co-founder, Ransom Love, was replaced as CEO by Darl McBride, and SCO began to serve the Wyrm.
"The SCO Group" is owned by and has since Caldera's inception basically been under the auspices of an umbrella corporation called the Canopy Group. It has been repeatedly theorized that somewhere about the time McBride came in, the Canopy Group gave up on ever making any money ever again on Caldera's projects. Now, goes the theory, the Canopy Group is using the SCO group for no purpose other than as a front/shell company, so that the Canopy Group can engage in illegal but profitable enterprises such as slander, barratry, and fraud, and then when all hell breaks loose as a result and the countersuits start rolling in, "the SCO Group" gets all the blame and takes all the damage and quietly goes bankrupt, and the Canopy Group walks away scot-free.
Has anyone noticed they are just advertising the COMPANY not the gamecube?
Yes, this is called "building brand image". They are probably advertising the company, not the gamecube, because they have more products than just the gamecube.
actually there are no plans for big gamecube games next year
This is where you are just wrong.
Never mind for the moment that there is a BIG bunch of gamecube games still to be released before the end of the 2003, that the best bunch of games are always likely to be released at the end of the year to fit the holiday season, and that Nintendo's historically been tight-lipped until E3. So far, here are a few of the scheduled GC releases for 2004:
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Pikmin 2
Pokemon Colosseum (rumored to contain a GC pokemon RPG)
Wario Ware GC
Tales of Symphonia
Resident Evil 4
Metal Gear Solid Twin Snakes
Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow
Harvest Moon
And these are *just* the headliners that have been announced so far. Nintendo is sure to announce a bunch of stuff once E3 comes. Somehow I don't really see what your worry is, this seems like a pretty impressive tenative lineup to me.
That some linux-related companies would drop libel/slander lawsuits on SCO and demand temporary injunctions. Yeah, there's a risk some of what SCO said is right, but even if there is accidental SysV code somewhere in Linux there are still any number of statements SCO has made that are clearly slanderous-- for example, SCO has a few times stated that the linux community was given the chance to remove the code yet didn't. (The community has had no such chance.) Dropping a few slander suits on SCO, even if the chances of winning aren't 100%, would take some huge chunks out of their sails.
Actually, that may or may not be such a good idea, as it would unnecessarily tie good linux companies up in litigation and might be sinking to SCO's level; but what I REALLY wish is that someone would start taking out some subpeona's on SCO. Redhat's sued SCO but that seems like it will take years to hit court. Is there any way that Redhat could sue the hypothetical person who put SysV code into linux and presented it as their own-- "John Doe", and subpeona from SCO all information relating to evidence SysV code was leaked into linux so they can find out who "John Doe" is? Is there any way that that might get into court and get a result quicker than waiting for the Redhat vs SCO case to wind its way into court?
Either way, one would think a slander case could get into court quicker because it regards an ongoing abuse..? Can you get injunctions over slander? Does anyone know?
If you think a stock pump-n-dump to illegaly make money is "the most vile of sin"s then i think you need to watch the evening news a bit more......It's a crime and should be punished
Dante's heirarchy of hell defines the worst level of sinners, those frozen with Satan in Hell's ninth and deepest layer, to be those who betray or kill country, kin, and benefactor.
SCO/Caldera would fit this definition, having produced a sustained attack for eight months now attempting to destroy, for its own shallow gain, the linux community from which the SCO group was born-- the community which produced the thing (linux) which allowed Caldera to gain all of its current status and wealth, including the wealth it used to buy SCO and the UNIX copyrights that give Caldera the pretenses for its suit. By Dante's heirarchy, this would put them in the same circle as the lady you mentioned, though slightly further from the center.
If you think that my definition of "betrayal against kin" is too loose, well, okay, we can free SCO of that allegation-- which has them doing a little bit better than the woman who left her 2-year old surviving for days on uncooked pasta it found-- but it should be noted that all that does is rise the SCO group up one layer to level 8, the level for fraudulence and malice, which dante apparently considered a worse sin than murder and violence (level 7).
I have stated this in a couple discussions similar to this one, but:
Spam laws do not have to stop all spam. If they can simply stop all local spam, they have still won a mighty battle.
The reasoning for this is that while the law will have no effect against foreign spammers, isolating spam-- even in a limited way-- drastically assists in every form of nonlegal spam combat available today.
In other words, if laws cause all spam to originate from sources outside of the U.S., or from outside of the current state, that makes it easier and more effective to administrate a blacklist, to administrate a whitelist, or to administrate a spam filter. This will, indeed, result in a dramatic impact on the spam problem.
Moreover, one would hope that if an american company hired a korean spammer, the american company would be subject to the spam laws even though they acted through a foreign agent. Is this accurate?
It's called "Piercing the Corporate Veil" and unless you guys did something really really sneaky this tactic is all but useless to protect you from litigation
Well, the canopy group seems sure as hell to expect that their tactic of using the "SCO Group" shadow company to pull all of this shit is going to protect them once the counter-judgements against SCO start rolling in..
A woman breaks up with her boyfriend. Following this, he constantly leaves creepy and threatening notes and, at one point, a dead cat, on her doorstep, and won't stop calling her at all hours of day or night. She goes to a judge, claims harassment, and gets a restraining order. The man cannot attempt to contact her or come within 300 feet of her house. Is this a violation of his free speech?
Some people put their names on a list saying that they do not want to be contacted by telemarketers and they consider it harassment. The FTC makes rules that say telemarketers cannot attempt to contact these people, becuase they have explicitly requested they not be contacted. Is this a violation of the telemarketing industry's free speech?
A woman has some friends who join the Church of Scientology. They then decide the woman needs to join the Church of Scientology as well. A big group of them constantly stand outside of her house, yelling at her, at all hours of the night. She goes to a judge, claims harassment, and gets a restraining order. The CoS members cannot attempt to contact her or come within 300 feet of her house. Is this a violation of their free speech?
An abortion clinic has a group of people who stand outside the clinic all day, hold signs, and shout slogans becuase they think abortion is wrong. The abortion clinic goes to a judge, claims harassment, and gets a restraining order. The protestors cannot attempt to come within 300 feet of the clinic. Is this a violation of their free speech?
The World Trade Organization meets and a large mass of people wish to protest the WTO for various reasons. The WTO goes to a judge, claims harassment, and gets a restraining order. The protestors cannot march or carry signs in the city center during the WTO's meeting days. Is this a violation of their free speech?
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's less that it's from Apple, and more that it's clean, it's simple, it works well and without fuss, it arranges everything to be as smooth and easy as possible for you, and most importantly, the entire thing from mp3 player to music store to portable music player is just one seamlessly, effortlessly integrated product...
That's Microsoft's big point of obsession, isn't it?
"Integration"?
I mean, yes, it certainly is nice that Microsoft is managing to implement this specific OS feature before Apple or the Linux community does, and they should get a gold star for Super Effort, but still.
If this were the "holy grail", wouldn't people have cared a lot more about it when BeOS did it ten years ago?
I find it amusing Microsoft has now for years been harping on this one SQL-drive feature in an OS that keeps getting pushed back and back. I guess it's because it's the only thing Microsoft has done in a long time that actually seems like innovation, since it's never been done before in an OS that most people have heard of.
In this case, they are giving the money to a charity. The only difference is that in this case, the charity is not a licensed nonprofit, and the beneficiary is not a bunch of starving children. The beneficiary of this charity is Microsoft.
If you give $50 million to a small cancer research lab, maybe they will find a cure for cancer. If they do achieve this, the payback will be absolutely massive, since, hey, you've got a cure for cancer. The chances this will happen are almost nonexistent. However, the chances are still indescribably greater than the chances there will be a large payback in the SCO case. Even taking seriously the idea there would be a sizeable payback in the SCO case displays an almost willful ignorance of the law and situation.
_____
The "big payoff" I assume everyone keeps referring to is that the courts will accept SCO's definition of "derivative work", in which case SCO owns fully literally every popular commercial operating system made since 1980 except for QNX and versions of the Mac OS earlier than 10.0. Besides this being logically absurd-- there is no way that if the UNIX intellectual properties were worth *that* much, that Caldera would have been able to buy them from Novell in the first place (both becuase Novell would not have sold it for an amount of money Caldera would have been able to buy, and because Caldera would not have had any money at all since Linux, where Caldera got that money from, would not have been possible)-- it is completely at odds with the way copyright as regards computer programs has been interpreted in every other instance ever. The alternate "big payoff" would come from some kind of "time bomb" propeitary code that someone at some point slipped into Linux unnoticed, which might at one point have gotten a small sum for SCO, but given that 1) the infringement on all parts except the initial person who inserted that code into linux was unintentional and 2) SCO has made no effort whatsoever to mitigate the damage done to them by this, SCO has destroyed any hope they might have had of getting significant money by this method.
The only possibilities are that SCO will recieve some small number of damages from the entry of code they own into the linux codebase-- code which will be, upon its disclosure, promptly removed-- or they will find some kind of minor "gotcha!" loophole in a contract with IBM by which IBM owes them money. This will not be a significant amount of money. Moreover, by their irresponsible and damaging public actions and statements while hyping this trial, SCO has opened themselves up to various countersuits-- for libel, for deceptive trade practices, for making various sorts of threats-- from many parties not at all involved in their initial IBM suit. Any money SCO gets from the paltry possibilities they have left will be dwarfed by the likely legal costs, as well as the money they may wind up owing from these suits. Moreover, once that money comes in, they will promptly cease to have any revenue strategy and their projected revenue will drop to zero.
This is why Ballmer wants security experts to "just shut up" about security problems in MS products.
How are they supposed to keep their "fixed in 24 hours" record going if they have to count from the point at which the exploit is discovered and in the wild, rather than from the point at which Microsoft decides to actually admit the vulnerability exists?
"How does Microsoft change a light bulb?" "They don't, they just redefine darkness as the new standard for light"...
Audio is fairly memory-expensive, and on top of simply playing the mp3s (which if i am right it does through quicktime-- not exactly the MOST memory-efficient thing out there) it has to do a decent amount of buffering with the audio. It does this both when simultaneously playing and downloading over the network, and when using this feature (the fade-between-tracks thing).
I know there are a couple different versions. If it doesn't work with the standard Wine it would be interesting to see if someone using the TransGaming version had better luck.
Also: do you have quicktime installed? Does quicktime even work with Wine? I suspect iTunes may not work without it.
I would love to test this myself, but my linux box is kind of in pieces on the floor at the moment, and I have yet to get around to emerging or testing wine..
"Pay up, we'll be sending out invoices"
Then a few months later:
"We won't be sending out invoices"
If they'd actually sent out any of the invoices, they could have been prosecuted for wire fraud. Which is, of course, why they didn't. The phantom "invoices" were just a trick to get people to think that there was something to this, and trick people into coming to SCO preemptively.
However, given that: Is SCO violating any kind of fraud/barratry laws by claiming they were going to send out these invoices, then not doing it? (At least given that the claim was clearly a way of tricking people into "voluntarily" giving up money?) Any at all? Just checking..
What on earth happened to the Space Exploration Act of 2003? That was the most exciting piece of news I've heard this year, and I haven't heard a word about it since it was introduced. What happened to it? Did it quietly drift into oblivion? Did it stall in committee? Is it dead yet, is it ever going to get to a vote?
HR 3057 was a coherent, realistic, and bold plan to revamp America's space program by setting it on an actual schedule with goals, and taking its focus away from "get into space and then come back" and toward doing actual interesting, forward-looking, long-term things, like developing intraorbital craft, setting up construction sites at Lagrange points, setting up research centers on celestial bodies, etc. It was well-designed, had provisions to ensure the schedule was stuck to, and could work. Where did it go?
Does anyone know what a good place is to check up on the status of introduced bills, since the general media seems to think the actual functioning of our government so hideously boring as to be beneath mention ever?
This might not actually work, but why don't you try writing a nice letter/email/petition to the people who make the Action Replay (it's kind of like Game Genie for PS2) and ask them to write some codes for Disagea and some other games to aid color-blind players? Changing color palettes seems like the kind of thing the Action Replay could be made to do with ease.
It is worth a shot, at least, perhaps, and it would be interesting to see their response..
If that is the case, that is the fault of the engineers, not of the FSF.
If the engineers went with linux without fully reporting to their overseers what the consequences of extending and selling as a commercial product Linux would be, they are guilty of almost criminal incompetence. They, or the overseers who okayed extending linux rather than looking for other options without being willing to accept the consequences of doing so, are be the ones who should be villified here, not the FSF.
The Internet may be an International Resource, but copyright varies wildly from country to country, and the copyrights and distribution rights for music, in particular, tend to be owned by completely different entities depending on which country you're in.
- If Apple releases an x86 OS X, the chances are it will NOT be a product you can walk to the store, buy in a box, and install on your current PC. First off, the margins are relatively slim on software OSes. Apple hardware is so expensive BECAUSE it's subsidizing the production of OS X. To survive as software, Apple would have to charge prices people wouldn't pay for software. Much more importantly, though, the fact apple has a working "x86" OS X in the lab doesn't mean they have an x86 OS they can sell. The "PC" hardware world is simply massive. At the time Windows 95 was released, the press was saying that more than half the code in W95 was hardware compatibility. Apple does not have the resources to spend huge amounts of time supporting and debugging every sound card, video card, joystick card, etc, in the universe.
Moreover, once you have this x86 OS X, what will you run on it? All the OS X software in the world would have to be compiled specifically for your x86 OS. Apple would have to convince ALL its developers to recompile and spend forevermore having to clumsily offer dual downloads/distributions of EVERYTHING based on target chip. There goes a big portion of the "it just works"-ness of OS X. Moreover some developers might refuse to compile for OS X out of spite. Apple could alternately try to create some kind of wine-like layer to let os x/x86 run windows software, which would be extremely costly and take away most of the "mac experience" feel of using the OS.
- If Apple did release their x86 OS X, it would most likely just be the same as today-- premium boxes based on commodity PC hardware parts, but in a shiny apple-branded case and with a high price tag. The only reason for this would be if for some reason they could put PC hardware together so much cheaper than PPC hardware it would justify the difficult switchover. (It is unlikely the price savings would be THAT much.) That would be about the only difference. But if they did this, they lose almost all of their justification for CHARGING their high prices in the first place-- you're no longer buying some kind of "special" apple box, you're buying a PC that just happens to be more expensive because it has a shiny case and can run OS X. Since the boxes would still be expensive, this would mean that you would lose the ENTIRE thing that all of you PC people clamoring for an x86 OS X want [Mac OS X on a $500 computer].
- "But wait", you say, "if apple were selling x86 computers, they could open up the hardware for cloning, or people could build their own, thus meaning the prices would be cheap again!" Well, no. Apple can do this just as easily while still using the PPC. Moreover, Apple has tried this with the PPC already. It didn't work. The other clone vendors, not having to use their money on R&D and developing the Mac OS, undercut Apple's prices and took away all of Apple's sales in the high-end, high-margin area. Apple lost a lot of money during the cloning experiment.
Apple is making money with their current scheme. It is questionable whether Apple could make money after changing the scheme to "something x86-based". The only x86 strategy that would significantly make more money than Apple's current strategy would be selling boxed OSes, which would be risky since it would require apple to drop their per-sale margins and spend massive amounts of time and resources on supporting the myriad of x86 hardware.It isn't going to happen.
Since the crooks and social deviants don't have any way whatsoever other than that page to find out about Microsoft's internet vulnerabilities.
Anyway, IE is too much a part of our lives for it be easy for us to know exactly what risks we are exposing ourselves to by using it. Enough negative PR is enough.
Ignorance is strength!
The market is so damn volatile these days that you cannot use it as evidence unless it could be proven that the accused performed actions specifically to manipulate the market.
Although I suspect that if this company released a product based on technology so obviously easy to circumvent that it could be disabled by holding down the shift key or using a non-Microsoft OS, and their stock dropped 20% as a result, their SHAREHOLDERS could quite likely sue the COMPANY for the horrible negligence of not realizing before shipping that their product did not work.
Am I right here? I'm not sure.
No one should have CD Autorun turned on anyway; it's a good vector for viruses. There have been so few Macintosh viruses in the last ten years you could count them on one hand, but the biggest one was a worm that spread ENTIRELY by copying itself into the Autorun space every time you made a CD or CD disk image on an infected machine. (This led to a hilarious incident in which apparently a number of copies of the Marilyn Manson Enhanced CD album "Mechanical Animals" were actually shipped infected with the CD autorun virus. Though this may have just been a rumor.)
I am now just waiting for the next logical step in people who believe that the fact they have children means they can make anyone do anything
Specifically, I am waiting for the movement of concerned parents to ban WiFi on the grounds that it is beaming harmful pornography into their children
OH GOD WONT ANYONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN
If Linux goes away, they suddenly have a market again.
The funny thing is, not even that is the case. If Linux goes away people will switch to BSD. I talked to people who've administrated SCO UNIX before this whole lawsuit mess started. As far as messy, user-unfriendly, behind-the-times propeitary unices go, it is the worst.
If every free OS in the world were somehow sued out of existence, people would flock to Solaris/x86 en masse before they'd even consider SCO UNIX.
The government is not necessarily the problem. The government is one possible source of control over your life. But only one. In America, at this point, corporations are more likely to be imposing on your freedoms than the government. The government has certain statutory limitations that still stand on what it's allowed to do to a private citizen, and the government has some tiny amount of accountability to the people since the people can exert a certain amount of influence by voting. Businesses, however, do not share these limitations, and people these days spend far more time interacting with businesses than they do interacting with their government.
OK, so we're at a point where anyone in this bar network can get the information on who's been drinking in the bars in this town. Now let's say, as a random aside, after a couple years, a small subsidiary of Time Warner just happens to buy one of these bars. Now let's say that two or so years later, you happen to be working for Time Warner, and your boss calls you in, looking at something on your personell file on the company intranet, and wanting to know why it is that the BarWatch statistics program is showing that you were in area bars for 35 hours this weekend when your project is two weeks behind schedule. Couldn't that time have been better spent on unpaid overtime...?
Or perhaps there will come a time in three years when you don't make rent, and your landlord simply promptly hands that debt off to a collection agency becuase that's an easy way of dealing with it. And all of a sudden when you swipe your drivers license at a bar, the bar, which has a certain complex deal with the credit union, is denying you entrance unless you pay the $200 that the computer says you owe to CCAA local #223..
These scenarios do not seem terribly realistic. However, it is definitely plausible. And a year ago, when slashdot was running the story that bars had started swiping drivers licenses instead of just looking at them, the people saying "THEY'LL JUST USE THIS TO TRACK YOU NEXT!" did not seem very realistic at all.
There's somehow this idea floating around that only the government wants to control you. This is a silly way to look at things. Anywhere in human social interactions that power collects is a source of danger.
All seek to enslave you, and I've already got this ravenous beast of plaster to deal with.
Originally SCO stood for "Santa Cruz Operation".
Eventually, SCO sold off its OS division, the one that made SCO UNIX and coincidentally happened at the time to own the original Unix copyrights (having bought them from Novell in 1995), to Caldera, a linux company. The remainder of what used to be SCO, the part Caldera didn't buy, is still operating under the name Tarantella.
Caldera, after buying SCO UNIX, changed its name to "The SCO Group." SCO doesn't stand for anything here. It's just "The SCO Group". Shortly after this the company's co-founder, Ransom Love, was replaced as CEO by Darl McBride, and SCO began to serve the Wyrm.
"The SCO Group" is owned by and has since Caldera's inception basically been under the auspices of an umbrella corporation called the Canopy Group. It has been repeatedly theorized that somewhere about the time McBride came in, the Canopy Group gave up on ever making any money ever again on Caldera's projects. Now, goes the theory, the Canopy Group is using the SCO group for no purpose other than as a front/shell company, so that the Canopy Group can engage in illegal but profitable enterprises such as slander, barratry, and fraud, and then when all hell breaks loose as a result and the countersuits start rolling in, "the SCO Group" gets all the blame and takes all the damage and quietly goes bankrupt, and the Canopy Group walks away scot-free.
Yes, this is called "building brand image". They are probably advertising the company, not the gamecube, because they have more products than just the gamecube.
actually there are no plans for big gamecube games next year
This is where you are just wrong.
Never mind for the moment that there is a BIG bunch of gamecube games still to be released before the end of the 2003, that the best bunch of games are always likely to be released at the end of the year to fit the holiday season, and that Nintendo's historically been tight-lipped until E3. So far, here are a few of the scheduled GC releases for 2004:
- Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
- Pikmin 2
- Pokemon Colosseum (rumored to contain a GC pokemon RPG)
- Wario Ware GC
- Tales of Symphonia
- Resident Evil 4
- Metal Gear Solid Twin Snakes
- Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow
- Harvest Moon
And these are *just* the headliners that have been announced so far. Nintendo is sure to announce a bunch of stuff once E3 comes. Somehow I don't really see what your worry is, this seems like a pretty impressive tenative lineup to me.That some linux-related companies would drop libel/slander lawsuits on SCO and demand temporary injunctions. Yeah, there's a risk some of what SCO said is right, but even if there is accidental SysV code somewhere in Linux there are still any number of statements SCO has made that are clearly slanderous-- for example, SCO has a few times stated that the linux community was given the chance to remove the code yet didn't. (The community has had no such chance.) Dropping a few slander suits on SCO, even if the chances of winning aren't 100%, would take some huge chunks out of their sails.
Actually, that may or may not be such a good idea, as it would unnecessarily tie good linux companies up in litigation and might be sinking to SCO's level; but what I REALLY wish is that someone would start taking out some subpeona's on SCO. Redhat's sued SCO but that seems like it will take years to hit court. Is there any way that Redhat could sue the hypothetical person who put SysV code into linux and presented it as their own-- "John Doe", and subpeona from SCO all information relating to evidence SysV code was leaked into linux so they can find out who "John Doe" is? Is there any way that that might get into court and get a result quicker than waiting for the Redhat vs SCO case to wind its way into court?
Either way, one would think a slander case could get into court quicker because it regards an ongoing abuse..? Can you get injunctions over slander? Does anyone know?
Well, now that you mention it..
If you think a stock pump-n-dump to illegaly make money is "the most vile of sin"s then i think you need to watch the evening news a bit more......It's a crime and should be punished
Dante's heirarchy of hell defines the worst level of sinners, those frozen with Satan in Hell's ninth and deepest layer, to be those who betray or kill country, kin, and benefactor.
SCO/Caldera would fit this definition, having produced a sustained attack for eight months now attempting to destroy, for its own shallow gain, the linux community from which the SCO group was born-- the community which produced the thing (linux) which allowed Caldera to gain all of its current status and wealth, including the wealth it used to buy SCO and the UNIX copyrights that give Caldera the pretenses for its suit. By Dante's heirarchy, this would put them in the same circle as the lady you mentioned, though slightly further from the center.
If you think that my definition of "betrayal against kin" is too loose, well, okay, we can free SCO of that allegation-- which has them doing a little bit better than the woman who left her 2-year old surviving for days on uncooked pasta it found-- but it should be noted that all that does is rise the SCO group up one layer to level 8, the level for fraudulence and malice, which dante apparently considered a worse sin than murder and violence (level 7).
I have stated this in a couple discussions similar to this one, but:
Spam laws do not have to stop all spam. If they can simply stop all local spam, they have still won a mighty battle.
The reasoning for this is that while the law will have no effect against foreign spammers, isolating spam-- even in a limited way-- drastically assists in every form of nonlegal spam combat available today.
In other words, if laws cause all spam to originate from sources outside of the U.S., or from outside of the current state, that makes it easier and more effective to administrate a blacklist, to administrate a whitelist, or to administrate a spam filter. This will, indeed, result in a dramatic impact on the spam problem.
Moreover, one would hope that if an american company hired a korean spammer, the american company would be subject to the spam laws even though they acted through a foreign agent. Is this accurate?
It's called "Piercing the Corporate Veil" and unless you guys did something really really sneaky this tactic is all but useless to protect you from litigation
Well, the canopy group seems sure as hell to expect that their tactic of using the "SCO Group" shadow company to pull all of this shit is going to protect them once the counter-judgements against SCO start rolling in..