a comic strip where certain frames are animated GIFs is an interesting idea. Even if there's nothing else to say about the strip, it's technically creative.
It's nice when web pages manage to make enough of their medium that they artistically become something more than just a digital approximation of something that ought to be printed on a sheet of paper. http://www.superbad.com http://www.radiohead.co.uk
of course the interesting question is, what about after labelling of unsolicited spam becomes required and standard..
it's very likely that anything with the ADV: tag will be refused relaying. The spam _won't_ be sent and recieved, since most ISP's won't want to allow anyone within their POP3 server to get spam, and the SMTP servers will refuse to accept it..
oh, and one more time: illegalizing spam altogether won't work. Spam will still be sent and recieved, but it will be done illegally and from fake e-mail adresses that can't be traced.
"As evidencd by the American experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, making a drug illegal causes its price to rise and its safety to decrease, but does not stop its use.." http://libertarian.org/policy.html#drugs
i don't know about Britain, but if allowed in the U.S. it would possibly be the worst idea ever.
Think about the possibilities for voter fraud.
Think about it. There is no good way of determining whether a person logging on over the internet is in fact who they claim. Social Security numbers and such are not kept terribly secret.
And with the number of people who vote as low as it is in the U.S., if someone wanted to cast a bunch of votes in the names of non-voters.. well, who would notice?
An even better idea would be for an individual candidate to sloppily cast a bunch of fake votes _against_ himself; but make it appear as if it was coming from the IP of the other campaigner. Then claim voter fraud.
The only way you could prevent this kind of thing would be either breaking the whole "secret ballot" system, or requiring an individual voter to register in person somewhere with a photo ID, at which point they would be given a randomly generated password. And if someone can go register for a password, well, that's enough of a bother that they might as well just fill out an absentee ballot and vote that way.
will you please explain to me what you mean by Amiga?
as someone who knows very little about the amiga other than the twenty minutes i spent trying to make the emulator work, i am very confused. First i find out that AmigaOS is actually becoming QNX, then i find out it's going to actually be linux?
And if the QNX amigaOS isn't going to run on amiga hardware..
What relationship if any does this thing have to "the Amiga"? The letter says something very vague about "host environment for a new class of portable applications - applications that exist in a pervasive networked computing environment" but that doesn't seem to mean anything.
Does this mean that the mighty Amiga has become a variation on KDE? Or what?
and what if the e-mail in question originated from outside of North Carolina? or from New Zealand?
Probably all this will do is convince bulk e-mailers to never, ever use real e-mail adresses, since they would be taking the risk that maybe one of the e-mail adresses they're sending to is inside of North Carolina.
Or maybe i'm misreading this.. "in contravention of the authority granted by or in violation of the policies set by the electronic mail service provider".. does this make it illegal to send bulk e-mail to an ISP that doesn't want bulk e-mail? or make it illegal to send bulk e-mail _FROM_ an ISP that doesn't want to send bulk e-mail?
if i'm reading this right, this means that any money that goes into the development of Debian or GNOME is tax-deductable?
so if some random company-- say, Redhat (ok, REALLY bad example) wanted to extend debian for some particular reason, any amount of money they spent paying programmers to do that would be tax-deductable, assuming they gave all code created to the debian community?
that's really cool.
err, wait-- isn't Redhat already paying people to work on GNOME?
i mean, i don't really see why this is a problem. It isn't particularly surprising for AOL to want to own some mp3 code, or for that matter to own some mp3.
so AOL wants to run some mp3 distribution channels. so? keep in mind that AOL is, and has always been, more of a content provider than a software provider. this is a natural step.
now, when they bought netscape, that was something to be scared of. After all, with Winamp, or i guess with Spinner, you have a multitude of alternatives. With netscape you have very little alternatives. Also, if aol owns winamp, that doesn't change mp3 at large. mp3 is still the same. but Netscape has great political power, and what the support can make or break a file format. Owning netscape means AOL now has close to direct control (shared with MS, anyway) over the HTML file format..
so the fact that AOL has crashed the mp3 party means little to the rest of the party. never mind that AOL is fairly evil, and that they might try to do evil things to the rest of the mp3 market. they can't cause much hurt.
of course, since i've never been to spinner.com, and since i already use a free (mac-only) mp3 player called SoundApp, it doesn't really affect me directly. if i'd paid ten bucks to own winamp it would alarm me that AOL had control of the code now.:P
what would be interesting is if they integrate winamp into AOL, and people immediately start trading pirated mp3 over AOL like crazy. Since they're using AOL's system to transmit and store the illegal mp3s, could AOL be sued? i dunno if AOL knows what it's getting into here.
this is really just kind of silly.. i don't think one single person would be happy with a $15 coupon, or even use the coupon.. i realize three people have said that already, but i think it's worthy of being said four times.
the thing that throws me the most is, there's no remedy of the problem. the modems are still labelled 56k; 3com is still free to claim their modems are twice as fast as 28.8 modems. You'd think that 3com would be required to rename them 53k modems, or something.
and dammit, who WROTE this class action thing? throughout the entire document they refer to "56K" modems. They AREN'T! they're 56k modems! using "K" means you're talking about kilobytes per second, but you're not-- you're talking about kilobits per second, "k". there's, like an 8x difference in bandwidth there. i realize i'm nitpicking, but keep in mind that misleading labeling of speed numbers is the point they sued to begin with!
anyway, look at this bit here.. If you do not request exclusion from the Settlement Class, you will be represented free of charge by the class counsel for the Settlement Class listed below. You may also appear through your own separate counsel at your own expense i suggest any 3com users here (unless they for some reason want a $15 coupon) request they be excluded, and maybe band together later for a class action suit with more meaningful results (assuming you care). Because if you send in a request of exclusion, that means the lawyers get paid less.
And we all know that even though the 3com users get basically nothing, a lawyer somewhere is getting millions of dollars in fees.
don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with linux. but THINK about this first: using ANY command-line operating system on a handheld computer would be hell. linux is still primarily text-based-- even with X you're largely running xTerms-- and i can imagine that inputting Linux commands (or even worse using VIM) using Graffiti would _not_ be fun.
The reason that the palmpilot is so popular is that it knows its limitations. The OS is designed to fit into that little tiny screen, and does it well. I doubt you'll get any PDA to work well unless the operating system is designed ground-up for the limited resources of a PDA. Linux would probably adapt much better to that kind of environment than Windows would, but even still i doubt you'll have anything you could really call Linux in a PDA. unless of, course, by "linux" you mean just the kernel, which i imagine would work just fine as something to build on.
i see no mention of anything on Varo's site that checks to see if the mp3s are legal. meaning the Varovision people have decided not to play lackey to the RIAA, and not to fear the RIAA's empty threats. we should all be proud of Varo, even those of us who have no intention of buying their products.
as for me, i'm just going to sit here and wait for someone to make an MP3 player app for the TI-86. Hey, it could happen! There's already TI software that lets you hook up headphones to the graphlink port.. -_-
i don't know exactly what antitrust law is like, but this is quite definately a violation of it, right?
[note: possible trolling ahead] this brings us to the point of what, exactly, is going to be accomplished by the government attacking microsoft.
It's all very easy to say "split up microsoft", but along what lines? and what would that accomplish, exactly? having three seperate Microsofts would do nothing _except_ confuse consumers,with no benefits. I think if they cut up MS into an OS company and an applications company, with the OS company not allowed to show any preferential treatment to the app company. The app company could integrate with the OS all they wanted, but it would have to be through open, clearly defined standards, so that Netscape could be integrated into the OS just as easily as MSIE (OpenDoc, anyone..? -_-).. then that would work well. It's hard to claim though that it would help anything Word and Outlook Express to be made by different companies. But this begs the question of where you draw the line between OS and applications. I think we could all agree that a web browser is an application, but aren't there certain internet-related functions (such as ping, telnet, time servers, etc.. yes, the windows telnet program SUCKS) that really ought to be handled by the OS? If MS wanted to let you mount an FTP server as a hard drive (which is definately innovative, and someting that makes sense) would they no longer be allowed to do that? Where do you draw the line? And what about Windows Media Player? I call WMP an application, and i believe that microsoft ought to bundle RealPlayer and Quicktime with Windows for the sake of their customers. But you could easily argue that WMP _ought_ to be part of the OS. For instance, look at apple's Quicktime, which is more a basic low-level library than a movie display program. If apple wanted to have the Finder use Quicktime for basic low-level bitmap display functions, they could do it very easily. But if MS did something like that, would it be a bad thing? (this is just an example. obviously WMP isn't that sophisticated.:P) Where do you draw the line? And if certain non-MS products start to get bundled with windows, which ones? Netscape of course, but what about Opera? We could probably say Quicktime and Realplayer ought to be included, but what about Vivoactive? there's no good reason to include vivoactive-- nobody uses it-- but you could argue that if QT and Real get in, so should vivo. This might get messy..
Another thing that would probably work is greatly reducing the power MS has over computer makers-- for instance, allowing them to bundle any non-MS software they want freely, or ship computers with other OSes or no OSes. This is, remember, why Netscape started this lawsuit to begin with. Is this an option for the government? i don't know antitrust law. It might be difficult to enforce though unless MS standardized the contracts between different computer makers, and MS wasn't allowed to turn away any buyers. After all if a company starts shipping Linux computers and their windows prices immediately double, it could be very easy to claim this is a coincidence when everyone is paying different prices for windows anyway.
The worst idea from my point of view is forcing MS to open-source its code, since the court is unlikely to take into serious consideration liscensing or future MS operating systems. Also that sets scary precedent. (and now that source code is legally free speech, doesn't MS have a right to withhold it if they want?)
I'm not arguing any one point of view, but i think the government really ought to have a clear idea going in of what exactly they're going to do if they win. Right now they don't seem to be worried about that at all; they'll just deal with it when they come to it, and don't seem aware it's the most important part of the case. Because there is a very real danger that they'll either set up some kind of wierd precedent that could attack other software companies later, or even worse do some very small insignifigant thing that helps no one. Because if even if the DOJ's final desicion is something unhelpful, they will likely never do anything else to MS because hey, they won the Microsoft case! Their work here is done! Rememeber, MS is supposedly already supposed to be prohibhited from tying products to the OS, but they do it anyway. this is what this lawsuit's about. if they didn't follow the earlier no-tying agreement, will they keep their promises after this one?
is it just me, or does this article seem to have no connection whatsoever to real life?
The first half of the article is more or less made up, the second half contains no objective facts. The second half is just opinions-- valid opinions, to be sure-- and the first half, as just an excuse for the second half of the article to exist, was inexcusable.
Then the geeks did something radical-- they got their hands on the discourse. It was this response that shivered the paradigm um.. what? the conversation on/. has had _no effect whatsever_ on mainstream discourse about littleton. I have yet to see a single mainstream news source mentioning the/. conversations, or allowing the opinion that, um, maybe it isn't _that_ bad for teenagers to wear black clothing.
People began having something resembling empathy for the shooters-- not for their crime but for their crisis, for what they told us about the terror and class divisions fissuring even affluent high school life. I read quite a bit of the slashdot conversation, and i don't seem to remember anything vaguely resembling empathy. there were some people who refused to demonize the killers (which i guess to the Voice counts as empathy) and some people who could understand the social position of the killers; but i don't think there was a single posting that sided with the posters, or identified with actually going out and cold-bloodedly shooting people who hadn't really done anything. And of course a lot of people here have felt sometimes like going into school and killing everyone, but there's a huge gap between _feeling_ like doing that and actually being willing to kill people.
The reason this entire article is off base is that _nobody's paying attention to slashdot_. Even if you accept the Voice's premise that the/. geeks should shut up and stop whining, you have to admit that the/. geeks should at least be _heard_.
The Voice missed the _point_ of katz's little polemics. The point wasn't self-pity so much as the little detail that this "geek" lifestyle is now suddenly classified as Dangerous. The article seemed to more or less ignore the fact that the school administrator type people have been massively clamping down on personal freedoms of anyone who didn't fit the social mold, since after all not fitting the social mold means you're alientated and that means you could possibly kill people. The way i remember Katz's postings, the point wasn't just to complain yeah, the littleton killers were right, high school sucks, the point was to argue that after the killings, the point was to document the suffering inflicted on the alienated in the name of Littleton. The nation mourned, but nobody was actually directly _hurt_ except for a couple hundred people in colorado, and the geeks. It's hard to say that a group which was blamed for littleton and is now being shuffled into "counceling" at the slightest provocation doesn't have a right to complain about that. And the worst bit is, the geeks really _aren't_ complaining, not where they can be heard. If the Plight of the Geeks had gotten any kind of mainstream media coverage, it would be different. But any limiting of personal freedoms has gone unnoticed and/or ignored.
Stop whining, said the Man, as he stomped on the geek's face.
Of course, that maybe the geeks shouldn't be whining is a perfectly valid opinion; but it shoulda been posted on slashdot, not presented as "news" to people who wouldn't have otherwise cared. What it comes across as is just the Voice wants to express to its readers that Look, this group of geek-type people sucks. And the readers probably wouldn't have otherwise cared the geeks existed.
And the whole race/gender thing was just a _little_ out of proportion. To be sure there's gonna be a predominance of white males caring about this, but that isn't exactly on _purpose_. The only reason anyone wouldn't be whining on slashdot is if they don't have the money to afford a computer/internet/etc. The Voice seems to be automatically assuming that anyone female, black or hispanic can't use a computer. Which, um, seems pretty racist to me.
oh, and the line that the postings "crashed slashdot" was horribly inflamatory. There were a lot of postings, but nothing near what it would take to eat/.'s bandwidth. Dude, you don't dis on Rob's server. You can't crash slashdot; slashdot crashes you. A lesson which the Voice's web admins are probably learning today.
Ok, i notice i've been kinda rambling, and didn't express what i wanted to say exactly the way i meant to. But you get what i meant.. right?
- mcc
so much blood for such a tiny little hole problems do have soloutions you know --NIN
the way i understand the liscense of MPEG, they must treat all users of the liscense fairly. the owners of the MPEG codecs can charge reasonable amounts of money of the users of the codec, but they can't flat-out deny usage, or anything like that.
according to that, doesn't this mean that the RIAA essentially has no power over mp3 player makers? they shouldn't be able to threaten them with anything, since the MPEG liscense itself says that they can't deny usage to anyone.
you could maybe argue the same thing about the "country codes" that DVD player makers are forced to implement. But sense the DVD hardware may not itself be included as part of MPEG-2 that may not apply. But i'm sure that simply creating a portable mp3 player is something that the RIAA has no right to even comment on.
and does it seem to anyone else that "secure digital music initiative" has the same kinda feel to it as "information purification directives"..?
-mcc who is worried that/. won't accept his password
if the judge rules that microsoft can clean-room java.. wouldn't that same ruling apply to clean-rooming other "machines", even real (not virtual) ones? like, say, connectix VGS? or SNES9X?
or are these different situations? does the fact that Java is copyrighted and the Playstation is patented change anything?
or does java's liscensing terms specifically allow clean-rooming? or something? excuse my ignorance..
or are we just up against the basic truth that people like the SNES9X group simply don't live under the same set of laws as huge corporations with lawyers such as MS?
...
whatever happened to SNES9X, anyway? the way i understood it from the earlier/. story they got some letter from nintendo saying they were illegal, and they immediately ceased to exist.
--mcclure111 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/hamsterdea th/
but since it's open-source, you ought to be able to port it to any machine you want, be it low-end power mac or 486. i glanced through some of the early posts to the darwin-development mailing list, and quite a few of the people seemed to expect to be able to easily run it on an x86 machine.
actually, now that i think about it, what about this whole "mach" thing? Darwin and OS X use the mach microkernel to communicate with the hardware, right? doesn't this mean you could basically port the entire Darwin OS to a new architecture by finding an existing Mach kernel (such as the mklinux ones..) for that architecture and dumping the Darwin OS on top of that?
what i'm curious about is when, or whether, i'll get to run Darwin on this here PPC 7200/75.
really, i'm still waiting for a coherent, complete overview of Darwin (viewed as an operating system and not as an attempt to cash in on the current "hipness" of Open-Source) with, y'know, a description of what it's like, or a screenshot or something. Hell, i've yet to hear of a single case of someone installing darwin.
And since in order to install darwin before binaries you essentially had to have an existing *nix distribution to install it, i doubt anyone did install darwin. At least i assume you'd need *nix, i never saw any instructions on apple's site, just a bunch of random.tar.gz files listed in a difficult-to-download-all-at-once line on a web site. no FTP. (though i haven't checked there in awhile).
And i don't know what it's like now, since i have not been able to actually get into the Darwin sections of apple's web site at any point in the last 24 hours. The server does not respond. It may just be too busy; either way i can't get in.
So while i have tried to figure it out, i'm still completely in the dark about Darwin. Does anyone have any details about this system? Like, is there some sort of GUI, is it difficult to use or incomplete or instable? What file system does it use? Ext2? HFS+?
I think this article is good enough. the person doesn't have their facts completely straight, but they had enough to at inform (at least a little) someone who has never heard of GNOME.
a couple people said that it implied UNIX had no GUI, but what the article meant is that there's no little icon you can click on to see your hard drive, which is more or less true.
Only problems i see with this is that it seemed to imply (at the end) that 1.0 was the first release-- i've never used GNOME, only KDE, but it seems to me that GNOME was pretty common a loong time before 1.0 came out. abc didn't seem to realize that OSS works on a steady stream of updates, not large occational ceremonious releases. 1.0 was just another update, i thought.
Also, i want to know why KDE wasn't mentioned in the article. Even if KDE isn't as good as GNOME, it at least deserves a slight mention. GNOME isn't the only project of its type.
as to viruses, it would depend on the way the law is worded. i don't think "writing malicious code" would be the language used to outlaw viruses. I wouldn't know though.
Anyway i seem to remember the Mellissa author was charged with "unauthorized entry to computer systems" or something. That wouldn't be covered under free speech.
What this is more likely to do is shift the legal emphasis from the author of the illegal program to the users of the illegal program. This would mean that people who write programs seen by some as "malicious"-- y'know, WinNuke, BackOrifice, AOL4FREE (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/story/3309.html ) and-- in some cases-- emulators.
The last one is the most important, to me anyway. if code is free speech then can Nintendo censor you?
--mcclure111 http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/hamsterdea th/ INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
wouldn't that start to seriously hurt your thumb after awhile? It's bad enough with the keyboard, with an entire two hands to spread the carpal tunnel syndrome out between.. but putting all the stress on the thumb? i dunno about that.
i have been using the mac version of QT4 beta, and the mp3 support needs some serious work. It doesn't like playing in the background. Try to do _anything_ while the mp3 is playing, and it will skip like a record player installed in a car.
I did notice the sound was much nicer than on any other mp3 player, but i suspect that's just because QT4 has bass amplification.
Someone told me it doesn't cache, or double-buffer, or some such term. Whatever it is, it earns the title "beta".
RMS suggestion #1: apple already follows #1. apple generally is very open about usage of all APIs and everything they have. This is because they do not compete directly with their developers.
If they are closed about anything it is the hardware, and it is usually because the specific hardware they won't explain is about to be changed, and thus they don't want anyone to depend on what might change.
apple doesn't count because it is not in their best interests to be closed up like microsoft is. they _want_ developers. they _need_ developers. they want to be kind to them, and if they refused to explain all their software it wouldn't help them. it would hurt them.
#2: similar case to #1 but not quite.
#3: does not apply. First off apple creates its own hardware, unlike MS, and therefore really has a right to dictate what its own hardware does. Secondly they don't "certify" anything. they just "refuse to support" certain things. They're a special case. This is probably not a good thing, but that's an argument for another day.
what sort of effect do you think it will have on BSD that apple is using its kernel as part of Mac OS X?
it's bound to have interesting effects on the whole BSD culture that a bunch of random mac users are suddenly going to have a BSD flavor installed on their machine. Even if they (the mac users) largely aren't aware of it.
I don't know whether Mac OS X will actually be able to run BSD programs normally. I think the bsd kernel is pretty much left alone. But still, that's a relatively large boost in the user base. Of course, because of Mach, Mklinux and kernel hosting you'll be able to boot a linux kernel off the same microkernel as mac os x, but that will only be if you specifically go and install it. The BSD pieces will be installed for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
a comic strip where certain frames are animated GIFs is an interesting idea. Even if there's nothing else to say about the strip, it's technically creative.
It's nice when web pages manage to make enough of their medium that they artistically become something more than just a digital approximation of something that ought to be printed on a sheet of paper.
http://www.superbad.com
http://www.radiohead.co.uk
of course the interesting question is, what about after labelling of unsolicited spam becomes required and standard..
it's very likely that anything with the ADV: tag will be refused relaying. The spam _won't_ be sent and recieved, since most ISP's won't want to allow anyone within their POP3 server to get spam, and the SMTP servers will refuse to accept it..
oh, and one more time: illegalizing spam altogether won't work. Spam will still be sent and recieved, but it will be done illegally and from fake e-mail adresses that can't be traced.
"As evidencd by the American experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, making a drug illegal causes its price to rise and its safety to decrease, but does not stop its use.." http://libertarian.org/policy.html#drugs
i don't know about Britain, but if allowed in the U.S. it would possibly be the worst idea ever.
Think about the possibilities for voter fraud.
Think about it. There is no good way of determining whether a person logging on over the internet is in fact who they claim. Social Security numbers and such are not kept terribly secret.
And with the number of people who vote as low as it is in the U.S., if someone wanted to cast a bunch of votes in the names of non-voters.. well, who would notice?
An even better idea would be for an individual candidate to sloppily cast a bunch of fake votes _against_ himself; but make it appear as if it was coming from the IP of the other campaigner. Then claim voter fraud.
The only way you could prevent this kind of thing would be either breaking the whole "secret ballot" system, or requiring an individual voter to register in person somewhere with a photo ID, at which point they would be given a randomly generated password. And if someone can go register for a password, well, that's enough of a bother that they might as well just fill out an absentee ballot and vote that way.
will you please explain to me what you mean by Amiga?
as someone who knows very little about the amiga other than the twenty minutes i spent trying to make the emulator work, i am very confused. First i find out that AmigaOS is actually becoming QNX, then i find out it's going to actually be linux?
And if the QNX amigaOS isn't going to run on amiga hardware..
What relationship if any does this thing have to "the Amiga"? The letter says something very vague about "host environment for a new class of portable applications - applications that exist in a pervasive networked computing environment" but that doesn't seem to mean anything.
Does this mean that the mighty Amiga has become a variation on KDE? Or what?
and what if the e-mail in question originated from outside of North Carolina? or from New Zealand?
Probably all this will do is convince bulk e-mailers to never, ever use real e-mail adresses, since they would be taking the risk that maybe one of the e-mail adresses they're sending to is inside of North Carolina.
Or maybe i'm misreading this.. "in contravention of the authority granted by or in violation of the policies set by the electronic mail service provider".. does this make it illegal to send bulk e-mail to an ISP that doesn't want bulk e-mail? or make it illegal to send bulk e-mail _FROM_ an ISP that doesn't want to send bulk e-mail?
i'm confused.. i don't speak lawyer.
does that include donations of time?
if i'm reading this right, this means that any money that goes into the development of Debian or GNOME is tax-deductable?
so if some random company-- say, Redhat (ok, REALLY bad example) wanted to extend debian for some particular reason, any amount of money they spent paying programmers to do that would be tax-deductable, assuming they gave all code created to the debian community?
that's really cool.
err, wait-- isn't Redhat already paying people to work on GNOME?
i mean, i don't really see why this is a problem. It isn't particularly surprising for AOL to want to own some mp3 code, or for that matter to own some mp3.
:P
so AOL wants to run some mp3 distribution channels. so? keep in mind that AOL is, and has always been, more of a content provider than a software provider. this is a natural step.
now, when they bought netscape, that was something to be scared of. After all, with Winamp, or i guess with Spinner, you have a multitude of alternatives. With netscape you have very little alternatives. Also, if aol owns winamp, that doesn't change mp3 at large. mp3 is still the same. but Netscape has great political power, and what the support can make or break a file format. Owning netscape means AOL now has close to direct control (shared with MS, anyway) over the HTML file format..
so the fact that AOL has crashed the mp3 party means little to the rest of the party. never mind that AOL is fairly evil, and that they might try to do evil things to the rest of the mp3 market. they can't cause much hurt.
of course, since i've never been to spinner.com, and since i already use a free (mac-only) mp3 player called SoundApp, it doesn't really affect me directly. if i'd paid ten bucks to own winamp it would alarm me that AOL had control of the code now.
what would be interesting is if they integrate winamp into AOL, and people immediately start trading pirated mp3 over AOL like crazy. Since they're using AOL's system to transmit and store the illegal mp3s, could AOL be sued? i dunno if AOL knows what it's getting into here.
this is really just kind of silly.. i don't think one single person would be happy with a $15 coupon, or even use the coupon.. i realize three people have said that already, but i think it's worthy of being said four times.
the thing that throws me the most is, there's no remedy of the problem. the modems are still labelled 56k; 3com is still free to claim their modems are twice as fast as 28.8 modems. You'd think that 3com would be required to rename them 53k modems, or something.
and dammit, who WROTE this class action thing? throughout the entire document they refer to "56K" modems. They AREN'T! they're 56k modems! using "K" means you're talking about kilobytes per second, but you're not-- you're talking about kilobits per second, "k". there's, like an 8x difference in bandwidth there. i realize i'm nitpicking, but keep in mind that misleading labeling of speed numbers is the point they sued to begin with!
anyway, look at this bit here..
If you do not request exclusion from the Settlement Class, you will be represented free of charge by the class counsel for the Settlement Class listed below. You may also appear through your own separate counsel at your own expense
i suggest any 3com users here (unless they for some reason want a $15 coupon) request they be excluded, and maybe band together later for a class action suit with more meaningful results (assuming you care). Because if you send in a request of exclusion, that means the lawyers get paid less.
And we all know that even though the 3com users get basically nothing, a lawyer somewhere is getting millions of dollars in fees.
um.. yuck.
don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with linux. but THINK about this first: using ANY command-line operating system on a handheld computer would be hell. linux is still primarily text-based-- even with X you're largely running xTerms-- and i can imagine that inputting Linux commands (or even worse using VIM) using Graffiti would _not_ be fun.
The reason that the palmpilot is so popular is that it knows its limitations. The OS is designed to fit into that little tiny screen, and does it well. I doubt you'll get any PDA to work well unless the operating system is designed ground-up for the limited resources of a PDA. Linux would probably adapt much better to that kind of environment than Windows would, but even still i doubt you'll have anything you could really call Linux in a PDA.
unless of, course, by "linux" you mean just the kernel, which i imagine would work just fine as something to build on.
i see no mention of anything on Varo's site that checks to see if the mp3s are legal.
meaning the Varovision people have decided not to play lackey to the RIAA, and not to fear the RIAA's empty threats. we should all be proud of Varo, even those of us who have no intention of buying their products.
as for me, i'm just going to sit here and wait for someone to make an MP3 player app for the TI-86. Hey, it could happen! There's already TI software that lets you hook up headphones to the graphlink port.. -_-
i don't know exactly what antitrust law is like, but this is quite definately a violation of it, right?
:P) Where do you draw the line?
[note: possible trolling ahead]
this brings us to the point of what, exactly, is going to be accomplished by the government attacking microsoft.
It's all very easy to say "split up microsoft", but along what lines? and what would that accomplish, exactly? having three seperate Microsofts would do nothing _except_ confuse consumers,with no benefits.
I think if they cut up MS into an OS company and an applications company, with the OS company not allowed to show any preferential treatment to the app company. The app company could integrate with the OS all they wanted, but it would have to be through open, clearly defined standards, so that Netscape could be integrated into the OS just as easily as MSIE (OpenDoc, anyone..? -_-).. then that would work well. It's hard to claim though that it would help anything Word and Outlook Express to be made by different companies.
But this begs the question of where you draw the line between OS and applications. I think we could all agree that a web browser is an application, but aren't there certain internet-related functions (such as ping, telnet, time servers, etc.. yes, the windows telnet program SUCKS) that really ought to be handled by the OS? If MS wanted to let you mount an FTP server as a hard drive (which is definately innovative, and someting that makes sense) would they no longer be allowed to do that? Where do you draw the line? And what about Windows Media Player? I call WMP an application, and i believe that microsoft ought to bundle RealPlayer and Quicktime with Windows for the sake of their customers. But you could easily argue that WMP _ought_ to be part of the OS. For instance, look at apple's Quicktime, which is more a basic low-level library than a movie display program. If apple wanted to have the Finder use Quicktime for basic low-level bitmap display functions, they could do it very easily. But if MS did something like that, would it be a bad thing? (this is just an example. obviously WMP isn't that sophisticated.
And if certain non-MS products start to get bundled with windows, which ones? Netscape of course, but what about Opera? We could probably say Quicktime and Realplayer ought to be included, but what about Vivoactive? there's no good reason to include vivoactive-- nobody uses it-- but you could argue that if QT and Real get in, so should vivo. This might get messy..
Another thing that would probably work is greatly reducing the power MS has over computer makers-- for instance, allowing them to bundle any non-MS software they want freely, or ship computers with other OSes or no OSes. This is, remember, why Netscape started this lawsuit to begin with.
Is this an option for the government? i don't know antitrust law.
It might be difficult to enforce though unless MS standardized the contracts between different computer makers, and MS wasn't allowed to turn away any buyers. After all if a company starts shipping Linux computers and their windows prices immediately double, it could be very easy to claim this is a coincidence when everyone is paying different prices for windows anyway.
The worst idea from my point of view is forcing MS to open-source its code, since the court is unlikely to take into serious consideration liscensing or future MS operating systems. Also that sets scary precedent. (and now that source code is legally free speech, doesn't MS have a right to withhold it if they want?)
I'm not arguing any one point of view, but i think the government really ought to have a clear idea going in of what exactly they're going to do if they win. Right now they don't seem to be worried about that at all; they'll just deal with it when they come to it, and don't seem aware it's the most important part of the case.
Because there is a very real danger that they'll either set up some kind of wierd precedent that could attack other software companies later, or even worse do some very small insignifigant thing that helps no one. Because if even if the DOJ's final desicion is something unhelpful, they will likely never do anything else to MS because hey, they won the Microsoft case! Their work here is done!
Rememeber, MS is supposedly already supposed to be prohibhited from tying products to the OS, but they do it anyway. this is what this lawsuit's about. if they didn't follow the earlier no-tying agreement, will they keep their promises after this one?
is it just me, or does this article seem to have no connection whatsoever to real life?
/. has had _no effect whatsever_ on mainstream discourse about littleton. I have yet to see a single mainstream news source mentioning the /. conversations, or allowing the opinion that, um, maybe it isn't _that_ bad for teenagers to wear black clothing.
/. geeks should shut up and stop whining, you have to admit that the /. geeks should at least be _heard_.
/.'s bandwidth. Dude, you don't dis on Rob's server. You can't crash slashdot; slashdot crashes you. A lesson which the Voice's web admins are probably learning today.
The first half of the article is more or less made up, the second half contains no objective facts. The second half is just opinions-- valid opinions, to be sure-- and the first half, as just an excuse for the second half of the article to exist, was inexcusable.
Then the geeks did something radical-- they got their hands on the discourse. It was this response that shivered the paradigm
um.. what? the conversation on
People began having something resembling empathy for the shooters-- not for their crime but for their crisis, for what they told us about the terror and class divisions fissuring even affluent high school life.
I read quite a bit of the slashdot conversation, and i don't seem to remember anything vaguely resembling empathy. there were some people who refused to demonize the killers (which i guess to the Voice counts as empathy) and some people who could understand the social position of the killers; but i don't think there was a single posting that sided with the posters, or identified with actually going out and cold-bloodedly shooting people who hadn't really done anything. And of course a lot of people here have felt sometimes like going into school and killing everyone, but there's a huge gap between _feeling_ like doing that and actually being willing to kill people.
The reason this entire article is off base is that _nobody's paying attention to slashdot_. Even if you accept the Voice's premise that the
The Voice missed the _point_ of katz's little polemics. The point wasn't self-pity so much as the little detail that this "geek" lifestyle is now suddenly classified as Dangerous. The article seemed to more or less ignore the fact that the school administrator type people have been massively clamping down on personal freedoms of anyone who didn't fit the social mold, since after all not fitting the social mold means you're alientated and that means you could possibly kill people. The way i remember Katz's postings, the point wasn't just to complain yeah, the littleton killers were right, high school sucks, the point was to argue that after the killings, the point was to document the suffering inflicted on the alienated in the name of Littleton. The nation mourned, but nobody was actually directly _hurt_ except for a couple hundred people in colorado, and the geeks. It's hard to say that a group which was blamed for littleton and is now being shuffled into "counceling" at the slightest provocation doesn't have a right to complain about that. And the worst bit is, the geeks really _aren't_ complaining, not where they can be heard. If the Plight of the Geeks had gotten any kind of mainstream media coverage, it would be different. But any limiting of personal freedoms has gone unnoticed and/or ignored.
Stop whining, said the Man, as he stomped on the geek's face.
Of course, that maybe the geeks shouldn't be whining is a perfectly valid opinion; but it shoulda been posted on slashdot, not presented as "news" to people who wouldn't have otherwise cared. What it comes across as is just the Voice wants to express to its readers that Look, this group of geek-type people sucks. And the readers probably wouldn't have otherwise cared the geeks existed.
And the whole race/gender thing was just a _little_ out of proportion. To be sure there's gonna be a predominance of white males caring about this, but that isn't exactly on _purpose_. The only reason anyone wouldn't be whining on slashdot is if they don't have the money to afford a computer/internet/etc. The Voice seems to be automatically assuming that anyone female, black or hispanic can't use a computer. Which, um, seems pretty racist to me.
oh, and the line that the postings "crashed slashdot" was horribly inflamatory. There were a lot of postings, but nothing near what it would take to eat
Ok, i notice i've been kinda rambling, and didn't express what i wanted to say exactly the way i meant to. But you get what i meant.. right?
- mcc
so much blood for such a tiny little hole
problems do have soloutions you know --NIN
the way i understand the liscense of MPEG, they must treat all users of the liscense fairly. the owners of the MPEG codecs can charge reasonable amounts of money of the users of the codec, but they can't flat-out deny usage, or anything like that.
/. won't accept his password
according to that, doesn't this mean that the RIAA essentially has no power over mp3 player makers? they shouldn't be able to threaten them with anything, since the MPEG liscense itself says that they can't deny usage to anyone.
you could maybe argue the same thing about the "country codes" that DVD player makers are forced to implement. But sense the DVD hardware may not itself be included as part of MPEG-2 that may not apply. But i'm sure that simply creating a portable mp3 player is something that the RIAA has no right to even comment on.
and does it seem to anyone else that "secure digital music initiative" has the same kinda feel to it as "information purification directives"..?
-mcc
who is worried that
if the judge rules that microsoft can clean-room java.. wouldn't that same ruling apply to clean-rooming other "machines", even real (not virtual) ones? like, say, connectix VGS? or SNES9X?
/. story they got some letter from nintendo saying they were illegal, and they immediately ceased to exist.
a th/
or are these different situations? does the fact that Java is copyrighted and the Playstation is patented change anything?
or does java's liscensing terms specifically allow clean-rooming? or something? excuse my ignorance..
or are we just up against the basic truth that people like the SNES9X group simply don't live under the same set of laws as huge corporations with lawyers such as MS?
...
whatever happened to SNES9X, anyway? the way i understood it from the earlier
--mcclure111
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/hamsterde
i'm certain there is, somewhere. apple did not invent mach.c /www/doc/abstracts/manual.html
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/mach/publi
macnn says that Darwin requires a G3.
.tar.gz files listed in a difficult-to-download-all-at-once line on a web site. no FTP. (though i haven't checked there in awhile).
but since it's open-source, you ought to be able to port it to any machine you want, be it low-end power mac or 486. i glanced through some of the early posts to the darwin-development mailing list, and quite a few of the people seemed to expect to be able to easily run it on an x86 machine.
actually, now that i think about it, what about this whole "mach" thing? Darwin and OS X use the mach microkernel to communicate with the hardware, right? doesn't this mean you could basically port the entire Darwin OS to a new architecture by finding an existing Mach kernel (such as the mklinux ones..) for that architecture and dumping the Darwin OS on top of that?
what i'm curious about is when, or whether, i'll get to run Darwin on this here PPC 7200/75.
really, i'm still waiting for a coherent, complete overview of Darwin (viewed as an operating system and not as an attempt to cash in on the current "hipness" of Open-Source) with, y'know, a description of what it's like, or a screenshot or something. Hell, i've yet to hear of a single case of someone installing darwin.
And since in order to install darwin before binaries you essentially had to have an existing *nix distribution to install it, i doubt anyone did install darwin. At least i assume you'd need *nix, i never saw any instructions on apple's site, just a bunch of random
And i don't know what it's like now, since i have not been able to actually get into the Darwin sections of apple's web site at any point in the last 24 hours. The server does not respond. It may just be too busy; either way i can't get in.
So while i have tried to figure it out, i'm still completely in the dark about Darwin. Does anyone have any details about this system? Like, is there some sort of GUI, is it difficult to use or incomplete or instable? What file system does it use? Ext2? HFS+?
Has anyone actually seen this mysterious OS?
I think this article is good enough. the person doesn't have their facts completely straight, but they had enough to at inform (at least a little) someone who has never heard of GNOME.
a couple people said that it implied UNIX had no GUI, but what the article meant is that there's no little icon you can click on to see your hard drive, which is more or less true.
Only problems i see with this is that it seemed to imply (at the end) that 1.0 was the first release-- i've never used GNOME, only KDE, but it seems to me that GNOME was pretty common a loong time before 1.0 came out. abc didn't seem to realize that OSS works on a steady stream of updates, not large occational ceremonious releases. 1.0 was just another update, i thought.
Also, i want to know why KDE wasn't mentioned in the article. Even if KDE isn't as good as GNOME, it at least deserves a slight mention. GNOME isn't the only project of its type.
i think it's good..
l ) and-- in some cases-- emulators.
a th/
as to viruses, it would depend on the way the law is worded. i don't think "writing malicious code" would be the language used to outlaw viruses. I wouldn't know though.
Anyway i seem to remember the Mellissa author was charged with "unauthorized entry to computer systems" or something. That wouldn't be covered under free speech.
What this is more likely to do is shift the legal emphasis from the author of the illegal program to the users of the illegal program. This would mean that people who write programs seen by some as "malicious"-- y'know, WinNuke, BackOrifice, AOL4FREE (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/story/3309.htm
The last one is the most important, to me anyway. if code is free speech then can Nintendo censor you?
--mcclure111
http://home.earthlink.net/~mcclure111/hamsterde
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
could they make gloves that would read sign language and use that as a keyboard? do they already?
was that wierd glove thing they had in the movie "Congo" made up?
wouldn't that start to seriously hurt your thumb after awhile? It's bad enough with the keyboard, with an entire two hands to spread the carpal tunnel syndrome out between..
but putting all the stress on the thumb? i dunno about that.
i have been using the mac version of QT4 beta, and the mp3 support needs some serious work. It doesn't like playing in the background. Try to do _anything_ while the mp3 is playing, and it will skip like a record player installed in a car.
I did notice the sound was much nicer than on any other mp3 player, but i suspect that's just because QT4 has bass amplification.
Someone told me it doesn't cache, or double-buffer, or some such term. Whatever it is, it earns the title "beta".
RMS suggestion #1: apple already follows #1. apple generally is very open about usage of all APIs and everything they have. This is because they do not compete directly with their developers.
If they are closed about anything it is the hardware, and it is usually because the specific hardware they won't explain is about to be changed, and thus they don't want anyone to depend on what might change.
apple doesn't count because it is not in their best interests to be closed up like microsoft is. they _want_ developers. they _need_ developers. they want to be kind to them, and if they refused to explain all their software it wouldn't help them. it would hurt them.
#2: similar case to #1 but not quite.
#3: does not apply. First off apple creates its own hardware, unlike MS, and therefore really has a right to dictate what its own hardware does. Secondly they don't "certify" anything. they just "refuse to support" certain things. They're a special case. This is probably not a good thing, but that's an argument for another day.
what sort of effect do you think it will have on BSD that apple is using its kernel as part of Mac OS X?
it's bound to have interesting effects on the whole BSD culture that a bunch of random mac users are suddenly going to have a BSD flavor installed on their machine. Even if they (the mac users) largely aren't aware of it.
I don't know whether Mac OS X will actually be able to run BSD programs normally. I think the bsd kernel is pretty much left alone. But still, that's a relatively large boost in the user base.
Of course, because of Mach, Mklinux and kernel hosting you'll be able to boot a linux kernel off the same microkernel as mac os x, but that will only be if you specifically go and install it. The BSD pieces will be installed for everyone.