Not to say that Linux doesn't have problems (they do: see ALSA/PulseAudio, open source video drivers for anything that's nVidia, lack of open-source firmware for wireless networking support). The problem with labeling groupware problems as "Linux problems" is that they're really not. They're larger than Linux.
Evolution, Kontact, and Thunderbird all run under multiple operating systems, including Windows. Would you say that it's a "Windows problem" if these programs can't do XML-RPC? No, you wouldn't.
The problem is that all open groupware sucks, and nobody seems to care about it, which is sad, really.
All of my machines have ATI video cards supported by the radeon driver. When playing Flash video with "Hardware Acceleration" turned on, they stutter and struggle and drop frames like crazy. When I turn off "Hardware Acceleration", the videos play smoothly. Given the video card in the HP Mini 1000, I doubht that this is purely an ATI video driver issue.
The flag is called the Image Constraint Token. It is in the standard, but the studios were holding off using it. However, my upscaling DVD changer from Sony(!) refuses to upscale DVDs with CSS except over HDMI with HDCP. Connected only with component video, it only acts as a progressive scan DVD player.
That must be why the drug cartel leaders personally escort the drugs across borders because they don't care about being shielded from the responsibility for their actions.
Of course gangs are specifically designed to insulate those at the top from legal responsibility for their actions. That's why there are drug mules that carry the drugs, a chain of intermediaries that carry orders (assumed to be from their boss, but can't be proven legally) to the people executing them. The whole point of being a higher-up a well-run gang is that the people below you get busted and you escape being charged.
I guess I fall into the "don't care" camp. I'm sufficiently bad at Guitar Hero that all of the notes I miss tend to drown out the notes in songs, and I'm sufficiently bad enough at singing in Rock Band that nobody can hear the cover band singer's voice. At that point, I'm more interested in having interesting and fun people to play with than I am about what band is playing what song.
I realize that I don't speak for all of the Rock Band/Guitar Hero players, but that's the opinion I've encountered about 75% of the time with people over the age of 20.
When you have the power of a censor list, you have the power to censor anybody.
Opposition party starting up and happens to believe that lolicon isn't child porn? Oh, that's obscene - filtered! Independent media outlet reporting on a war with gruesome photos of the carnage? Oh, that's too shocking - filtered!
The standards for blocking a site are also quite vague. What if you are on a shared host and one of the sites on the shared host has porn the nanny state doesn't like? Does that mean you get filtered by association?
There's a lot of room for this list to be played with against independent media and opposition political parties. That's why it's popular with the media and the politicians.
"Fuck you if you're blind. Now bend over and take it."
You'd think he would be happy about this as it increases the reach of written works to a group of people that couldn't previously use them - the illiterate. 80% of the world's population is literate, according to the UN, meaning they can write and read in one language. Therefore, 20% of the world's population, about 1,340,000,000 people, can't read.
I thought the RIAA strategy of alienating customers through lawsuits was bad. Here's the president of a guild saying that 1.34 billion new potential customers aren't important to him.
Just because there's no right to privacy in a public place doesn't mean that I have to like being taped. Nor does it mean that I have to stay in the country, city, county, business, or any other place that I'm being taped.
The remedy would be to leave, and that is exactly what I'm proposing.
Actually, that's not true. For covers, you pay money to the copyright holder and you can publish your songs commercially. For an in-depth (but not legal advice!) breakdown in plain English, I recommend CD Baby's How to Legally Sell Downloads of Cover Songs.
However, I'm not sure that it applies to video games:
This Compulsory License is only available for sales in the United States. Other uses of masters, such as streaming, conditional downloads, and the like, are not subject to a Compulsory License. A separate license from the publisher is needed in those cases.
I would seriously consider emigrating to a country that treated its IT systems correctly and did things like this when they were needed. I haven't seen it happen yet, though.
I would serious consider moving out of a country with 1 CCTV camera for every 14 people before I worried about how they treated their IT systems.
This sort of thing is very easy to use these days.
Take, for example, Mixmaster. Great way to send truly anonymous email to somebody. Of course, they are unable to reply unless they know your email address (which Mixmaster hides), so layer Mixmaster with a nym server. Then you can send email, the person that receives the email can reply to it, and all of the traffic is encrypted and sent through the Mixmaster network.
If you want to take it a step further, use Mixmaster with nym server accounts which forward to Usenet. Then you can send from a regular email client, and you check a group of your choice for the encrypted responses. The only person who knows what to look for is you (because it is encrypted) and anybody can get in touch with you without knowing your real email address.
So go ahead, tap Skype if you want. Private communication across the Internet will keep going.
Until they installed the Firefox extension that turns this feature off, and if that can't be done, until they download a version of Firefox with this hacked out.
People care more about a smooth experience than they do about security, which is why Microsoft will never do this, especially after the UAC debacle.
Better would be to force hardware companies to reveal specifications. Right now, there are regulations that say that the ingredients of food have to be listed on the label because some people might be allergic to (or just curious about) the ingredients. The original IBM PC came with a listing of the BIOS and the board layout and specifications. Why shouldn't hardware manufacturers be required to provide specifications for their hardware?
Why is it, ultimately, not in their best interest to do so? They are in the business of selling hardware, and if they get a request from a user asking for drivers for a new/different platform, all they have to do is point to the specification and tell them to have at it. Linux kernel developers can use the spec, write a driver, get it in the mainline of the kernel, and support it out of the box for everyone using the kernel regardless of architecture (assuming, of course, that the hardware has the correct hardware interface [PCI/USB/FireWire/PCI-X/AGP]), meaning less hassles for users. The hardware company could even write a reference driver if they felt it necessary.
I understand that some hardware manufacturers are using patented techniques or licensed technology in their hardware, but all of that can be abstracted away in a hardware design - one does not need to know how the silicon of an ALU is implemented to write assembly code - there is a well defined interface - machine code. When sending instructions to a device, you can also have a well defined interface.
I am not a lawyer, I want to reply to this to correct a misunderstanding that many people are having.
There are two issues that are getting conflated: technical inability to use a product and legal inability to use a product.
Back when OS X ran only on PowerPC hardware, people with x86 were unable to use it as their operating system because their current system was incapable of running it due to differences in processors and machine code. This is a technical inability. Apple didn't need to put any statement in their license agreement telling purchasers that their software could only be used on Apple branded hardware because the only machines technically capable of running it were Apple branded hardware.
Now that Apple machines use x86 processors and a mostly-PC architecture, (one of the main differences is that Apple machines use EFI which makes them "legacy-free", whereas most PCs still have a BIOS and most PC operating systems rely on that BIOS to load themselves) it is not an issue of technical inability. If a machine has EFI (or an EFI emulator that boots from the BIOS), it is technically capable of running OS X as its operating system. Apple doesn't like this because they want to sell more hardware, so they put a provision in their license telling people that the software is not licensed for this purpose. This is legal inability.
PS3 games not playing on anything but the PS3 and XBox 360 games not playing on anything but the XBox 360 are technical inabilities. If somebody made a box that was technically capable of playing these games without infringing on Sony's IP (unlikely, but that's another bullshit topic), then Sony wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they tried to sue the PS3-clone maker.
The only reason that Apple has any leg to stand on here is that copyright laws are crazy. The reason software requires a license is due to the fact that running a program requires a copy of it to be made from the external representation (disk, CD-ROM, DVD) to internal storage (memory). Only the copyright holder, by default, is allowed to do this. In order to allow others to use the program without breaking copyright law, current law says that they must be granted a license. However, a copyright holder's right to deny copying must be balanced against the potential abuse of consumer rights by not allowing people to copy the work that they paid for. It gets into a favorite argument of Slashdot users:
If a software company is only selling us a license, then why don't they give us a replacement CD at nominal cost in perpetuity, or, if the program moves from CD to DVD, why shouldn't I be legally entitled to order a version on replacement media? (For example, I have a lot of old games on floppy. If I purchased only a license to these, not the actual media, can I go to Microprose and ask for a copy of Civilization on CD-ROM because I don't have a floppy drive anymore? Why not?)
Legal inability in furtherance of selling some product reeks of tying, which is forbidden because it infringes on the rights of the buyers of a product.
The parent's point is that if Apple wants to sell their OS without the hardware, they should not be allowed to put in the license for that software that you can only use it on Apple hardware. Their remedy, if they don't want their OS being used on non-Apple hardware, is to not sell OS X separately from the hardware.
When you buy a DVD or Blu-Ray from Sony, do you have to agree to a license that says you can only play it back on a Sony player on a Sony television? Why should it be any different with Apple?
The only problem I have with OSX is that it is currently against the license agreement to use it on any machine other than an Apple branded machine. If they said "we only support Apple branded hardware", then I wouldn't have a problem with it - the user can use the disc and software however he wants, but only when it is installed on Apple hardware is he entitled to support.
In this vein, HP could sell HP-UX to whomever wants it, but only offer support if it is installed on HP branded hardware.
Given her foreign policy credentials, are the Republican talking heads going to advance this event as proof of her experience with geology and vulconalogy?
This is why I stopped releasing software that I wrote. The idiot count just proved too high. Specifically:
People not reporting bugs to their distro when my programs were in their distro, and 9 times out of 10 it was something their distro fucked up
People emailing me asking if I would configure the software for them (at least twice a day)
People telling me they wouldn't use my software if I didn't add "xyz" feature (good, fuck 'em)
People demanding I make a DEB, RPM, ebuild, autopackage, etc for their distro
People telling me that they really liked my software and would like to use it in a commercial product and could I just let them do that for free pretty please (fuck off)
People complaining that my software wouldn't compile on their Windows box (oh noes!)
Basically people wanting my time for nothing. I agree that software should be free as in speech, but that's not the end goal. That is only the beginning. Once the source is out there, if you can't program, you can find somebody who can make the changes for you and release them for other people to use. That is the end goal.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to say that Linux doesn't have problems (they do: see ALSA/PulseAudio, open source video drivers for anything that's nVidia, lack of open-source firmware for wireless networking support). The problem with labeling groupware problems as "Linux problems" is that they're really not. They're larger than Linux.
Evolution, Kontact, and Thunderbird all run under multiple operating systems, including Windows. Would you say that it's a "Windows problem" if these programs can't do XML-RPC? No, you wouldn't.
The problem is that all open groupware sucks, and nobody seems to care about it, which is sad, really.
I've seen this in Debian as well.
All of my machines have ATI video cards supported by the radeon driver. When playing Flash video with "Hardware Acceleration" turned on, they stutter and struggle and drop frames like crazy. When I turn off "Hardware Acceleration", the videos play smoothly. Given the video card in the HP Mini 1000, I doubht that this is purely an ATI video driver issue.
This is on Debian unstable, x86_64.
No, you're wrong.
If it copies to NAND (the internal Wii memory) before launching, then, by definition, games aren't being launched directly off SD card.
The flag is called the Image Constraint Token. It is in the standard, but the studios were holding off using it. However, my upscaling DVD changer from Sony(!) refuses to upscale DVDs with CSS except over HDMI with HDCP. Connected only with component video, it only acts as a progressive scan DVD player.
That must be why the drug cartel leaders personally escort the drugs across borders because they don't care about being shielded from the responsibility for their actions.
Of course gangs are specifically designed to insulate those at the top from legal responsibility for their actions. That's why there are drug mules that carry the drugs, a chain of intermediaries that carry orders (assumed to be from their boss, but can't be proven legally) to the people executing them. The whole point of being a higher-up a well-run gang is that the people below you get busted and you escape being charged.
A Logitech Harmony sounds like what you're looking for. Unfortunately, it's not cheap due to its features that aren't what you described.
In a world of $25 cell phones, you'd think someone would have figured this out how to make something like this cheap already.
Apparently, a scoop is 3/4 of a cup.
The more you know...
I guess I fall into the "don't care" camp. I'm sufficiently bad at Guitar Hero that all of the notes I miss tend to drown out the notes in songs, and I'm sufficiently bad enough at singing in Rock Band that nobody can hear the cover band singer's voice. At that point, I'm more interested in having interesting and fun people to play with than I am about what band is playing what song.
I realize that I don't speak for all of the Rock Band/Guitar Hero players, but that's the opinion I've encountered about 75% of the time with people over the age of 20.
When you have the power of a censor list, you have the power to censor anybody.
Opposition party starting up and happens to believe that lolicon isn't child porn? Oh, that's obscene - filtered! Independent media outlet reporting on a war with gruesome photos of the carnage? Oh, that's too shocking - filtered!
The standards for blocking a site are also quite vague. What if you are on a shared host and one of the sites on the shared host has porn the nanny state doesn't like? Does that mean you get filtered by association?
There's a lot of room for this list to be played with against independent media and opposition political parties. That's why it's popular with the media and the politicians.
"Fuck you if you're blind. Now bend over and take it."
You'd think he would be happy about this as it increases the reach of written works to a group of people that couldn't previously use them - the illiterate. 80% of the world's population is literate, according to the UN, meaning they can write and read in one language. Therefore, 20% of the world's population, about 1,340,000,000 people, can't read.
I thought the RIAA strategy of alienating customers through lawsuits was bad. Here's the president of a guild saying that 1.34 billion new potential customers aren't important to him.
Just because there's no right to privacy in a public place doesn't mean that I have to like being taped. Nor does it mean that I have to stay in the country, city, county, business, or any other place that I'm being taped.
The remedy would be to leave, and that is exactly what I'm proposing.
Actually, that's not true. For covers, you pay money to the copyright holder and you can publish your songs commercially. For an in-depth (but not legal advice!) breakdown in plain English, I recommend CD Baby's How to Legally Sell Downloads of Cover Songs.
However, I'm not sure that it applies to video games:
This Compulsory License is only available for sales in the United States. Other uses of masters, such as streaming, conditional downloads, and the like, are not subject to a Compulsory License. A separate license from the publisher is needed in those cases.
I would seriously consider emigrating to a country that treated its IT systems correctly and did things like this when they were needed. I haven't seen it happen yet, though.
I would serious consider moving out of a country with 1 CCTV camera for every 14 people before I worried about how they treated their IT systems.
This sort of thing is very easy to use these days.
Take, for example, Mixmaster. Great way to send truly anonymous email to somebody. Of course, they are unable to reply unless they know your email address (which Mixmaster hides), so layer Mixmaster with a nym server. Then you can send email, the person that receives the email can reply to it, and all of the traffic is encrypted and sent through the Mixmaster network.
If you want to take it a step further, use Mixmaster with nym server accounts which forward to Usenet. Then you can send from a regular email client, and you check a group of your choice for the encrypted responses. The only person who knows what to look for is you (because it is encrypted) and anybody can get in touch with you without knowing your real email address.
So go ahead, tap Skype if you want. Private communication across the Internet will keep going.
Until they installed the Firefox extension that turns this feature off, and if that can't be done, until they download a version of Firefox with this hacked out.
People care more about a smooth experience than they do about security, which is why Microsoft will never do this, especially after the UAC debacle.
The primaries are just a formality when a senior Senator is involved.
Tell that to Joe Lieberman.
Better would be to force hardware companies to reveal specifications. Right now, there are regulations that say that the ingredients of food have to be listed on the label because some people might be allergic to (or just curious about) the ingredients. The original IBM PC came with a listing of the BIOS and the board layout and specifications. Why shouldn't hardware manufacturers be required to provide specifications for their hardware?
Why is it, ultimately, not in their best interest to do so? They are in the business of selling hardware, and if they get a request from a user asking for drivers for a new/different platform, all they have to do is point to the specification and tell them to have at it. Linux kernel developers can use the spec, write a driver, get it in the mainline of the kernel, and support it out of the box for everyone using the kernel regardless of architecture (assuming, of course, that the hardware has the correct hardware interface [PCI/USB/FireWire/PCI-X/AGP]), meaning less hassles for users. The hardware company could even write a reference driver if they felt it necessary.
I understand that some hardware manufacturers are using patented techniques or licensed technology in their hardware, but all of that can be abstracted away in a hardware design - one does not need to know how the silicon of an ALU is implemented to write assembly code - there is a well defined interface - machine code. When sending instructions to a device, you can also have a well defined interface.
I am not a lawyer, I want to reply to this to correct a misunderstanding that many people are having.
There are two issues that are getting conflated: technical inability to use a product and legal inability to use a product.
Back when OS X ran only on PowerPC hardware, people with x86 were unable to use it as their operating system because their current system was incapable of running it due to differences in processors and machine code. This is a technical inability. Apple didn't need to put any statement in their license agreement telling purchasers that their software could only be used on Apple branded hardware because the only machines technically capable of running it were Apple branded hardware.
Now that Apple machines use x86 processors and a mostly-PC architecture, (one of the main differences is that Apple machines use EFI which makes them "legacy-free", whereas most PCs still have a BIOS and most PC operating systems rely on that BIOS to load themselves) it is not an issue of technical inability. If a machine has EFI (or an EFI emulator that boots from the BIOS), it is technically capable of running OS X as its operating system. Apple doesn't like this because they want to sell more hardware, so they put a provision in their license telling people that the software is not licensed for this purpose. This is legal inability.
PS3 games not playing on anything but the PS3 and XBox 360 games not playing on anything but the XBox 360 are technical inabilities. If somebody made a box that was technically capable of playing these games without infringing on Sony's IP (unlikely, but that's another bullshit topic), then Sony wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they tried to sue the PS3-clone maker.
The only reason that Apple has any leg to stand on here is that copyright laws are crazy. The reason software requires a license is due to the fact that running a program requires a copy of it to be made from the external representation (disk, CD-ROM, DVD) to internal storage (memory). Only the copyright holder, by default, is allowed to do this. In order to allow others to use the program without breaking copyright law, current law says that they must be granted a license. However, a copyright holder's right to deny copying must be balanced against the potential abuse of consumer rights by not allowing people to copy the work that they paid for. It gets into a favorite argument of Slashdot users:
If a software company is only selling us a license, then why don't they give us a replacement CD at nominal cost in perpetuity, or, if the program moves from CD to DVD, why shouldn't I be legally entitled to order a version on replacement media? (For example, I have a lot of old games on floppy. If I purchased only a license to these, not the actual media, can I go to Microprose and ask for a copy of Civilization on CD-ROM because I don't have a floppy drive anymore? Why not?)
Legal inability in furtherance of selling some product reeks of tying, which is forbidden because it infringes on the rights of the buyers of a product.
The parent's point is that if Apple wants to sell their OS without the hardware, they should not be allowed to put in the license for that software that you can only use it on Apple hardware. Their remedy, if they don't want their OS being used on non-Apple hardware, is to not sell OS X separately from the hardware.
When you buy a DVD or Blu-Ray from Sony, do you have to agree to a license that says you can only play it back on a Sony player on a Sony television? Why should it be any different with Apple?
The only problem I have with OSX is that it is currently against the license agreement to use it on any machine other than an Apple branded machine. If they said "we only support Apple branded hardware", then I wouldn't have a problem with it - the user can use the disc and software however he wants, but only when it is installed on Apple hardware is he entitled to support.
In this vein, HP could sell HP-UX to whomever wants it, but only offer support if it is installed on HP branded hardware.
He's getting very old, but he's a good mouse.
Wow, is that the best the dittoheads can come up with? I think Rush was much more comical and insightful on drugs.
Given her foreign policy credentials, are the Republican talking heads going to advance this event as proof of her experience with geology and vulconalogy?
This is why I stopped releasing software that I wrote. The idiot count just proved too high. Specifically:
Basically people wanting my time for nothing. I agree that software should be free as in speech, but that's not the end goal. That is only the beginning. Once the source is out there, if you can't program, you can find somebody who can make the changes for you and release them for other people to use. That is the end goal.
Because pre-boot system partition encryption only works on x86/x86_64 and only for Windows.