I've seen Lost and Prison Break episodes on torrent sites at least a week before airing...
Before airing where? I don't know about Lost of Prison Break, and it's certainly not the case for the latest series, but I seem to remember that the UK got the first series of the new Battlestar Galactica before the US did.
That is, until Trusted Computing is made mandatory and getting at the keys in memory will be impossible because the 'Trusted Computing' stuff won't let you at it.:)
There's no such thing as impossible in this context, merely "prohibitively difficult". If TCP is implemented, someone will subvert it. If that's too hard or unwieldy, someone will subvert the secure path. If that's too hard, someone will rip open a TV and capture the raw audio and visual signals as they're sent to the speakers and display.
If that's too hard, someone will just train a high-quality camcorder at the screen, place a microphone near the speaker and get it that way.
No DRM system can prevent a determined and skilful enough adversary, as long as that content is intended for consumption by human senses. To do that, you'd need to employ guards to watch viewers to prevent them from copying it, which isn't going to happen any time soon.
Pushed how? I simply ignored it, as did most people I know. In what way was it pushed on us?
you can't blame them for being a bit angry at being left out in the cold
Yes I can - they chose to use ActiveX, possibly for very good reasons I'll grant, but it was still their choice. Now, 10 years later, MS has finally addressed some glaring security holes which makes that choice a bad one.
I really don't see how this is anyone's fault, let alone MS's. Things change over time, and you either have to adapt, or make yourself comfortable using outmoded software. Now if MS had deliberately done this in order to make things difficult for the South Koreans that would be a different story, but there's no reason to believe that that's the case.
You are kidding right?! So if the U.S. were to go to war with China and the military took a million prisoners, each and everyone of those prisoners of war should be entitled to due process? Everyone of them should be provided with attorneys if they cannot afford them? Every prisoner taken should be able to file a petition for illegal detention in the courts (habeas corpus)? Every prisoner should be entitled to a speedy trial?
Yes, by dint of the fact that they are human beings.
Because this is slashdot, and perl is one of the Chosen Few Languages, along with C, Ruby, Python and PHP. Java, being both closed (for the moment) and slow (5 years ago on the client side) is not. Therefore, any statement that compares Java favourably with one of the Few Chosen Languages must be either a troll or flamebait.
It's easier when you stop fighting the groupthink.
It's nothing to do with the EU, but the title says "EU Countries", which France and Germany most definitely are. If it said "EU Calls Out iTunes DRM", then the complaint would be more valid.
The problem, such as it is, is that a lot of people listen more to who is being quoted than the quote itself. That is, it's not what's being said so much as who is saying it that lends the words their weight - it's an appeal to authority. Fictional characters are often imbued with an authority that they simply do not have; yes, Gandalf and Yoda are wise, but what they actually say is only as wise (or not) as their writers are.
A lot of people have a tendency to hear/read a quotation and think "Oh, *X* said it? It must be true, they're clever/wise/good/etc!", and so react badly to a quotation from a fictional character. Just think of all the times you've seen a poster here bolster their argument by mentioning a couple of people who also support their point, even though they have no connection with the subject at hand (eg Linus's thoughts on DRM or copyright - he's a talented programmer, but he's not a lawyer).
The speed of light in a vacuum (c) is the absolute maximum speed at which information can travel. It doesn't matter how much you cool the chip or what materials you make it out of, given our current understanding of physics* you can't push anything through it faster than 3*10**8 m/s. That gives you an absolute cannot-be-bettered upper limit for the distance that your signal can move in one cycle.
(* which might be wrong, but no-one's managed to prove it wrong yet)
*Light* has nothing to do with it, it's relativity and the *speed* of light in a vacuum that's important.
1) For a while a year or two ago, it seemed like every other story posted was submitted by him 2) He used to always link *only* to his own blog, not to the actual article in question 3) He (used to?) sells his consulting services on how to drive traffic to your website 4) Despite numerous complaints and comments, neither he nor the admins were listening to us
Now they're not necessarily all his fault, but all together it lead to an awful lot of speculation, including about whether or not he was paying for his stories to be posted. It was this uproar, when the admins finally took notice, that lead to the "nofollow" attribute being added to the submittor's URL when a story is posted.
I can't blame him for shamelessly seeking a little bit of publicity on Slashdot in order to make some money with his blog.
That's just it though - for a while, he was shamelessly seeking - and getting - a lot of publicity. It started to look an awful lot like advertising to a lot of people, some of which pay not to get adverts here.
I was at JavaUk06 last year, and in his keynote speech (one of) the Marketing VPs spent quite a lot of time extolling the virtues of their new line of SunFire servers, paying particular attention to their power:performance ratio compared to similar Xeon-based servers. Listening to him then, you'd have thought that Opterons were the best thing since sliced bread. Yes, I realise that his job is to push their current and up-coming products and solutions, but the main thrust of his talk was "Opteron-powered SunFire servers use far less power than those crappy, power-hungry Xeon servers".
With all the ire at GEMA's actions, I think the message here is clear: as covered above, we all respect the musicians, and we want them to have more money, rights, and respect. But only on our terms. If they take legal actions or otherwise demand more money, rights, or respect -- in other words, if they simply get too uppity -- then they're on equal moral grounds as the RIAA et al.
Almost, but not quite. It basically boils down to us all wanting the artists to have more money, rights, etc - just as long as they don't try to exercise or protect those rights.
I think you'll find you have to knowingly look the other way; not being aware of it at all isn't a crime, although may still leave you open to some sort of negligence charge if you *should* have known about it for whatever reason.
You've hit on a jangly nerve which is typically overlooked by Microsoft fanboys and shills.
It's also overlooked by those of us who have no particular love for Office, but who haven't seen that problem in 7+ years of working with Word. Thankfully (as I hate office apps in general) I don't have to spend a great deal of time in Word very often, so perhaps I simply haven't been exposed to it enough to see the problems you mention.
(Oh, and not everyone who points out possible downsides to switching away from a given MS product is a fanboy or a shill, especially in a corporate environment. If I use Word and it screws up an important client document, that's one thing; if I use OpenOffice and it does it, I'm going to get shit for using it instead of Word. It's as simple as that.)
I wasn't aware that the Nazis experienced any particular problems with their system of tattooing people.
Now if you want to argue that the circumstances surrounding the scheme and the motivation for it were particularly awful I'd be in full agreement. The scheme itself, however, I believe was a success.
Cute, but I already have a Vista-capabale PC and a shelf full of games, and can get Vista Ultimate OEM with a hard drive for around £180. If I bought a console, I'd need to buy games and a TV (which believe it or not I don't currently have). Of course it depends on your definition of "decent TV", but mine starts at a cost of around £1000, given the one I used to have.
It's perfectly simple. In order to play back HD-DVD or Blueray content at full resolution, all hardware and software devices involved must be locked down. That is stipulated by the content producers, and compliance with this is a condition of the licence required to implement playback.
MS had a choice - comply and offer playback on Vista, or refuse to comply and not offer playback. They evidently decided that their customers would prefer the former.
People define thoughtcrimes to make their jobs easier because it doesn't force them to debate items in question (from Holocaust denial to questioning state history to global warming).
I once read a justification for Holocaust denial being illegal that actually made sense, although I have no idea if it's the real reason or an after-the-fact justification.
The argument was that by denying that the Holocaust happened, you are in effect calling every Holocaust-survivor a liar (as they must necessarily then be lying about their experiences), which is libel (or slander, depending on how you make the claims). As the survivors have already been through enough without having to relive it all in court, the decision was taken to make it a criminal rather than civil offence, so the government could prosecute on their behalf.
Like I said, I've no idea if that's true or just something someone made up, but it makes a kind of sense to me. I'm not entirely sure I agree with it, but I can see the logic of it.
Despite being a long-time PC gamer (with no plans to change that), I am considering finally getting a console.
I appreciate that I'm a lone person and so largely irrelevant, but Sony can forget about getting my money. Even if I had forgotten about the rootkit fiasco (and I haven't), that's out of my price range given there are cheaper alternatives.
MS tried to embrace and extend Java, but failed when Sun took them to court for breach of the licence; they added their own, Windows-specific classes to the java.* package hierarchy, which you're not allowed to do. Had they added them to a com.microsoft package hierarchy they'd have been fine - but then Java devs would've realised they weren't part of the core API and potentially avoided them.
I note that this does not disprove your point, in fact if anything it reinforces it - Java was not completely open, and it was this partially closed nature that saved it.
That's not an entirely fair comparison. You really should be comparing the Firefox team to the IE team, as the whole of MS isn't developing IE or aiding it in any way whatsoever.
Yes, MS has huge resources at its disposal, but what fraction is actually available to the IE team?
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen Lost and Prison Break episodes on torrent sites at least a week before airing...
Before airing where? I don't know about Lost of Prison Break, and it's certainly not the case for the latest series, but I seem to remember that the UK got the first series of the new Battlestar Galactica before the US did.
What would happen if we all started replying with the same auto generated mails?
The time it takes me to deal with the 2000+ spams I get each day would increase unmanageably?
That is, until Trusted Computing is made mandatory and getting at the keys in memory will be impossible because the 'Trusted Computing' stuff won't let you at it. :)
There's no such thing as impossible in this context, merely "prohibitively difficult". If TCP is implemented, someone will subvert it. If that's too hard or unwieldy, someone will subvert the secure path. If that's too hard, someone will rip open a TV and capture the raw audio and visual signals as they're sent to the speakers and display.
If that's too hard, someone will just train a high-quality camcorder at the screen, place a microphone near the speaker and get it that way.
No DRM system can prevent a determined and skilful enough adversary, as long as that content is intended for consumption by human senses. To do that, you'd need to employ guards to watch viewers to prevent them from copying it, which isn't going to happen any time soon.
a technology that MS pushed on everyone
Pushed how? I simply ignored it, as did most people I know. In what way was it pushed on us?
you can't blame them for being a bit angry at being left out in the cold
Yes I can - they chose to use ActiveX, possibly for very good reasons I'll grant, but it was still their choice. Now, 10 years later, MS has finally addressed some glaring security holes which makes that choice a bad one.
I really don't see how this is anyone's fault, let alone MS's. Things change over time, and you either have to adapt, or make yourself comfortable using outmoded software. Now if MS had deliberately done this in order to make things difficult for the South Koreans that would be a different story, but there's no reason to believe that that's the case.
You are kidding right?! So if the U.S. were to go to war with China and the military took a million prisoners, each and everyone of those prisoners of war should be entitled to due process? Everyone of them should be provided with attorneys if they cannot afford them? Every prisoner taken should be able to file a petition for illegal detention in the courts (habeas corpus)? Every prisoner should be entitled to a speedy trial?
Yes, by dint of the fact that they are human beings.
Why did the parent modded as troll?
Because this is slashdot, and perl is one of the Chosen Few Languages, along with C, Ruby, Python and PHP. Java, being both closed (for the moment) and slow (5 years ago on the client side) is not. Therefore, any statement that compares Java favourably with one of the Few Chosen Languages must be either a troll or flamebait.
It's easier when you stop fighting the groupthink.
I don't really know that many people that are running 64 bit computers, using 64 bit aware operating systems and 64 bit software
In my case, that's because of a lack of support from the vendors. I can have a 64 bit OS *or* wireless networking, for example (thank you, Netgear).
It's nothing to do with the EU, but the title says "EU Countries", which France and Germany most definitely are. If it said "EU Calls Out iTunes DRM", then the complaint would be more valid.
The problem, such as it is, is that a lot of people listen more to who is being quoted than the quote itself. That is, it's not what's being said so much as who is saying it that lends the words their weight - it's an appeal to authority. Fictional characters are often imbued with an authority that they simply do not have; yes, Gandalf and Yoda are wise, but what they actually say is only as wise (or not) as their writers are.
A lot of people have a tendency to hear/read a quotation and think "Oh, *X* said it? It must be true, they're clever/wise/good/etc!", and so react badly to a quotation from a fictional character. Just think of all the times you've seen a poster here bolster their argument by mentioning a couple of people who also support their point, even though they have no connection with the subject at hand (eg Linus's thoughts on DRM or copyright - he's a talented programmer, but he's not a lawyer).
The speed of light in a vacuum (c) is the absolute maximum speed at which information can travel. It doesn't matter how much you cool the chip or what materials you make it out of, given our current understanding of physics* you can't push anything through it faster than 3*10**8 m/s. That gives you an absolute cannot-be-bettered upper limit for the distance that your signal can move in one cycle.
(* which might be wrong, but no-one's managed to prove it wrong yet)
*Light* has nothing to do with it, it's relativity and the *speed* of light in a vacuum that's important.
The problem a lot of people have with Roland is:
1) For a while a year or two ago, it seemed like every other story posted was submitted by him
2) He used to always link *only* to his own blog, not to the actual article in question
3) He (used to?) sells his consulting services on how to drive traffic to your website
4) Despite numerous complaints and comments, neither he nor the admins were listening to us
Now they're not necessarily all his fault, but all together it lead to an awful lot of speculation, including about whether or not he was paying for his stories to be posted. It was this uproar, when the admins finally took notice, that lead to the "nofollow" attribute being added to the submittor's URL when a story is posted.
I can't blame him for shamelessly seeking a little bit of publicity on Slashdot in order to make some money with his blog.
That's just it though - for a while, he was shamelessly seeking - and getting - a lot of publicity. It started to look an awful lot like advertising to a lot of people, some of which pay not to get adverts here.
Ok, correct me if I'm wrong, isn't the British Police the home of Scottland Yard?
No, London is the home of (New) Scotland Yard...
I was at JavaUk06 last year, and in his keynote speech (one of) the Marketing VPs spent quite a lot of time extolling the virtues of their new line of SunFire servers, paying particular attention to their power:performance ratio compared to similar Xeon-based servers. Listening to him then, you'd have thought that Opterons were the best thing since sliced bread. Yes, I realise that his job is to push their current and up-coming products and solutions, but the main thrust of his talk was "Opteron-powered SunFire servers use far less power than those crappy, power-hungry Xeon servers".
With all the ire at GEMA's actions, I think the message here is clear: as covered above, we all respect the musicians, and we want them to have more money, rights, and respect. But only on our terms. If they take legal actions or otherwise demand more money, rights, or respect -- in other words, if they simply get too uppity -- then they're on equal moral grounds as the RIAA et al.
Almost, but not quite. It basically boils down to us all wanting the artists to have more money, rights, etc - just as long as they don't try to exercise or protect those rights.
I think you'll find you have to knowingly look the other way; not being aware of it at all isn't a crime, although may still leave you open to some sort of negligence charge if you *should* have known about it for whatever reason.
You've hit on a jangly nerve which is typically overlooked by Microsoft fanboys and shills.
It's also overlooked by those of us who have no particular love for Office, but who haven't seen that problem in 7+ years of working with Word. Thankfully (as I hate office apps in general) I don't have to spend a great deal of time in Word very often, so perhaps I simply haven't been exposed to it enough to see the problems you mention.
(Oh, and not everyone who points out possible downsides to switching away from a given MS product is a fanboy or a shill, especially in a corporate environment. If I use Word and it screws up an important client document, that's one thing; if I use OpenOffice and it does it, I'm going to get shit for using it instead of Word. It's as simple as that.)
At that point why dont they just chain you up and throw you in maximum "pound me in the ass" prison while they're at it.
Even for slashdot, that's a ridiculously large leap to make.
I wasn't aware that the Nazis experienced any particular problems with their system of tattooing people.
Now if you want to argue that the circumstances surrounding the scheme and the motivation for it were particularly awful I'd be in full agreement. The scheme itself, however, I believe was a success.
Cute, but I already have a Vista-capabale PC and a shelf full of games, and can get Vista Ultimate OEM with a hard drive for around £180. If I bought a console, I'd need to buy games and a TV (which believe it or not I don't currently have). Of course it depends on your definition of "decent TV", but mine starts at a cost of around £1000, given the one I used to have.
It's perfectly simple. In order to play back HD-DVD or Blueray content at full resolution, all hardware and software devices involved must be locked down. That is stipulated by the content producers, and compliance with this is a condition of the licence required to implement playback.
MS had a choice - comply and offer playback on Vista, or refuse to comply and not offer playback. They evidently decided that their customers would prefer the former.
You mean like you get all the features and support of RHEL when you download Fedora?
You pay your money and you take your choice; you don't get the features of the luxury edition of a car when you buy the basic model, do you?
People define thoughtcrimes to make their jobs easier because it doesn't force them to debate items in question (from Holocaust denial to questioning state history to global warming).
I once read a justification for Holocaust denial being illegal that actually made sense, although I have no idea if it's the real reason or an after-the-fact justification.
The argument was that by denying that the Holocaust happened, you are in effect calling every Holocaust-survivor a liar (as they must necessarily then be lying about their experiences), which is libel (or slander, depending on how you make the claims). As the survivors have already been through enough without having to relive it all in court, the decision was taken to make it a criminal rather than civil offence, so the government could prosecute on their behalf.
Like I said, I've no idea if that's true or just something someone made up, but it makes a kind of sense to me. I'm not entirely sure I agree with it, but I can see the logic of it.
Despite being a long-time PC gamer (with no plans to change that), I am considering finally getting a console.
I appreciate that I'm a lone person and so largely irrelevant, but Sony can forget about getting my money. Even if I had forgotten about the rootkit fiasco (and I haven't), that's out of my price range given there are cheaper alternatives.
Just my two penn'orth.
MS tried to embrace and extend Java, but failed when Sun took them to court for breach of the licence; they added their own, Windows-specific classes to the java.* package hierarchy, which you're not allowed to do. Had they added them to a com.microsoft package hierarchy they'd have been fine - but then Java devs would've realised they weren't part of the core API and potentially avoided them.
I note that this does not disprove your point, in fact if anything it reinforces it - Java was not completely open, and it was this partially closed nature that saved it.
That's not an entirely fair comparison. You really should be comparing the Firefox team to the IE team, as the whole of MS isn't developing IE or aiding it in any way whatsoever.
Yes, MS has huge resources at its disposal, but what fraction is actually available to the IE team?