Ah, no offence meant - it was relatively early morning for me, and I'm not a mornings person:-)
I also seem to remember seeing this exact same(?) comment attached to a number of articles here recently, which did grate a little - in a "we *know*, we get the message!" sort of way. To be honest, my beef is more with the moderators that continue to mod it up, but that's another gripe entirely...
As for other sites, well, I only really read here and HuSi at the moment, and I would advise against posting it to HuSi, as it's by no means a tech site. Post it once, we'll go "yeah, it's shit, whatever"; post it two or three times, we'll get arsey:-) I guess you've already sounded out k5 on the subject, but I've not regularly read there since people started fleeing to HuSi.
What you say about rpm hell is true, but only for distro-maintained packages, or those 9relatively few) that have packages aimed specifically at your distro.
If you want anything else, then you're in danger of entering rpm hell. Sure, you can compile from source and build an rpm, but until and unless that becomes a one-click process, it'll be beyond almost everyone that most people here seem so desperate to move to Linux.
No "normal" user, and progressively fewer of us power user/developers, wants to have to bother with messing around with their OS. You may enjoy it, and sure, I used to, but these days, I just want it to work and get out of my way so I can get on with doing whatever it is I actually want to do.
While it may seem to someone in America that the UK may be overpaying for their online music, it probably doesn't seem that way to someone actually in the UK.
What, you think we can't do basic maths?;-)
I've seen the price disparity mentioned in BBC news articles about online music services - 99c in the US, 99p in the UK, with a current exchange rate of around 1.7USD/GBP. Don't worry, some of us at least know that we're being ripped off. Sure, it's cheaper than buying a CD, but it should be. With a music download, you're not getting a physical backup of the music (you have to create your own), and you don't get a case with a nice inlay, notes, etc.
Just because something is cheaper, doesn't mean it's cheap enough, especially if it's available more cheaply elsewhere, with only artificial limits preventing us from purchasing from that source instead. (ie there's no technological reason why I can't buy music from an online retailer in the US, the data can flow easily enough if they'd only let it)
Why? The online service can simply use a geo-IP service to barr any non-native IP addresses. Even if you use a proxy, they can check your credit card/billing address, and refuse based on that.
No amount of technical wizardry is going to allow me to successfully pretend to be living in the US when I have to give them the address that my credit card is registered to.
Do you post this to every story that's even remotely connected to the DMCA, no matter how tenuously? This is about the (financial) cost of electronic-format music on sale online, not copyright!
And please, moderators; Interesting? Informative? I know we all hate the DMCA with a passion of which others can only dream, but this is completely off topic.
It was "The Heart's Filthy Lesson" by David Bowie. One night, alone in the house for a change, I suddenly got the urge to listen to it. That happens to me sometimes - I'll get a snatch of a song stuck in my head, and it jsut won't quit until I've heard it properly.
Anyway, I know it from the closing credits of Se7en, which at the time I had on video (and now have on DVD). I didn't fancy sitting in front of the TV, fastforwarding and rewinding the video just to hear the song, so I hit my PC to find some way of buying an electronic copy. CD would be no good - I needed to hear it *now*.
After an hour or so searching, I couldn't find a single site even willing to sell me music in mp3 (in the UK, at least), let alone that track. (This was after Napster had been sued into oblivion - I was a late comer to this party).
So, remembering what I'd read about p2p apps, I installed and fired up Kazaa. Within about 20 minutes I had the song, and was able to scratch that particular itch.
That was about 18 months ago, I'd guess, and I'm *still* not aware of an online, electronic music store that is willing to sell to the UK. There's a Coke run/sponsorsed one that's supposed to be starting tomorrow, so I'll give it a whirl, but I don't hold out much hope. For one thing, my tastes aren't really mainstream enough; for another, I've heard that it'll be 99p/track, making it roughly 75% more expensive than the much-touted 99c/track that most US services charge. Somehow, that just doesn't seem fair...
I don't think that anyone here assumes that (well, okay, maybe some). However, I personally assume that, for the majority of p2p networks at least, the number of people distributing infringing copies of stuff vastly outweighs the number of people like yourself.
Look at it this way - if the usage figures that some clients report are even vaguely accurate, then the chances of a significant proportion of it being non-infringing are, imho, miniscule.
Similarly, here in the UK, copying of audio (and video, of course) works for backup or media-shifting purposes is technically illegal without express permission from the copyright holder, and always has been.
Doesn't seem to stop anyone from doing it, though, and I can't imagine that it would ever be enforced.
So tell me, how much input do you get on which articles get posted and which rejected?
We passively consume the articles, occasionally getting our suggestions accepted. But the real active part only comes *after* the article is posted, and we get to discuss it. Even if the vast majority of us agreed that an article was crap, and should never have been posted, we couldn't change it one iota.
The way he goes on about CD keys, you'd think that they were the root of all gaming evils.
I don't read the site normally, so I have no idea how old the guy is, but surely he can't be so young as to not remember some of the hoops we had to jump through back in the old, 8 bit, tape-based days?
Hands up who remembers spending an hour or more fiddling with their tape deck to get Jet Set Willy to load? And then have to type in a particular colour code once it had loaded? Or the LensLok system that Elite used, where you held a very breakable plastic lens up to the screen to make a code readable? Some games even came with little hardware dongles.
He seems to think that it all started with Q3, when in reality, the computer games industry has been doing that sort of thing for about 20 years. Ubiquitous, high-speed net connections may well take it to the next level, but I can't see it being anywhere near as bad as he paints it. If that were true, it should've already been intolerable for a decade or so.
He's not defending the Saudi legal system, he's giving individual people the benefit of the doubt.
Just because a person isn't willing to sacrifice themself for the good of others, does not make them complicit. If that were the case, then we would all be just as guilty for sitting here in our nice homes, rather than travelling out there to help our oppressed fellow humans.
You're confusing the regime, with individual citizens/subjects of the country. Or do you not think it possible that the majority of Saudi geeks deplore the regime under which they live, but can see no way to effect change?
Then there was Java, which traditionally has used Vi or EMACS as a sort of IDE.
I do hope you're joking - I've been a Java programmer for 3.5 years now, and while I certainly *could* use vi (and some of my colleagues do), I wouldn't choose to do so.
There are a great many proper IDEs available for developing Java, including Borland's JBuilder (which includes a free-as-in-beer version for personal use), netbeans (Free), eclipse (Free), AnyJ (free under Linux), etc.
Sure, you can use your favourite text editor and ant, but why make life difficult for yourself?
The web exploded - suddenly hundreds of thousands of dynamic sites, and sites with at least some dynamic content, sprang up in an amazingly short amount of time. The web was transformed from a purely flat, static medium to a dynamic one.
But mobile phones aren't static. The more modern ones can already run applications written in C/C++ or Java. Simply adding support for perl merely increases the number of people who could write code for them. The difference is nowhere near as great as CGI vs custom web server was.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, by any means. I just don't see it having quite the same degree of impact as the poster.
That's true in the general case, but if I were you, I'd dig out whatever agreement or contract you signed when you were accepted into your school/college/university and have a good read of the small print. I suspect you may find that you've signed copyright over to the institution on anything that you produce in the course of your studies.
gpl is all about the developer's rights. user access to code is a by-product.
I couldn't agree more. Lots of people here seem to confuse users and developers. I believe that I understand RMS's motivations for creating the GPL - to redress the perceived power imbalance between the technical elite (developers) and the technical 'underclass' (users). By allowing/enforcing free access to the source, everyone can make whatever changes they like.
All good in theory, but there's a snag - the vast majority of users can't make changes, even with the source. They neither know how to code, nor care, and in a lot of cases, quite possibly wouldn't be any good even if they were taught. That's not an insult - I'm a pretty good programmer, but, for example, can't sing, can't draw, and have very little "traditional" creative talent. I'll never be an artist, or a musician, or an athlete, and in the same way, most people will never be programmers.
That, I think, is something a lot of people forget - end-user access to the code is essentially irrelevant. It is just a byproduct of allowing developers access to it.
The automatic updates tool only checks for critical updates, but no, it doesn't appear to rely on IE - at least, at no stage during notification, download or install does it invoke IE directly. It may rely on some networking component or other; I've not actually investigated it. It definitely doesn't open an IE window, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the OP did say "is going to", as in future tense...
Ah, no offence meant - it was relatively early morning for me, and I'm not a mornings person :-)
:-) I guess you've already sounded out k5 on the subject, but I've not regularly read there since people started fleeing to HuSi.
I also seem to remember seeing this exact same(?) comment attached to a number of articles here recently, which did grate a little - in a "we *know*, we get the message!" sort of way. To be honest, my beef is more with the moderators that continue to mod it up, but that's another gripe entirely...
As for other sites, well, I only really read here and HuSi at the moment, and I would advise against posting it to HuSi, as it's by no means a tech site. Post it once, we'll go "yeah, it's shit, whatever"; post it two or three times, we'll get arsey
Heh - that's how I started to read that line at first, at least until I got to the disclaimer at the end :-)
What you say about rpm hell is true, but only for distro-maintained packages, or those 9relatively few) that have packages aimed specifically at your distro.
If you want anything else, then you're in danger of entering rpm hell. Sure, you can compile from source and build an rpm, but until and unless that becomes a one-click process, it'll be beyond almost everyone that most people here seem so desperate to move to Linux.
No "normal" user, and progressively fewer of us power user/developers, wants to have to bother with messing around with their OS. You may enjoy it, and sure, I used to, but these days, I just want it to work and get out of my way so I can get on with doing whatever it is I actually want to do.
While it may seem to someone in America that the UK may be overpaying for their online music, it probably doesn't seem that way to someone actually in the UK.
;-)
What, you think we can't do basic maths?
I've seen the price disparity mentioned in BBC news articles about online music services - 99c in the US, 99p in the UK, with a current exchange rate of around 1.7USD/GBP. Don't worry, some of us at least know that we're being ripped off. Sure, it's cheaper than buying a CD, but it should be. With a music download, you're not getting a physical backup of the music (you have to create your own), and you don't get a case with a nice inlay, notes, etc.
Just because something is cheaper, doesn't mean it's cheap enough, especially if it's available more cheaply elsewhere, with only artificial limits preventing us from purchasing from that source instead. (ie there's no technological reason why I can't buy music from an online retailer in the US, the data can flow easily enough if they'd only let it)
Why? The online service can simply use a geo-IP service to barr any non-native IP addresses. Even if you use a proxy, they can check your credit card/billing address, and refuse based on that.
No amount of technical wizardry is going to allow me to successfully pretend to be living in the US when I have to give them the address that my credit card is registered to.
Do you post this to every story that's even remotely connected to the DMCA, no matter how tenuously? This is about the (financial) cost of electronic-format music on sale online, not copyright!
And please, moderators; Interesting? Informative? I know we all hate the DMCA with a passion of which others can only dream, but this is completely off topic.
(Do your worst, I have Karma to burn)
It was "The Heart's Filthy Lesson" by David Bowie. One night, alone in the house for a change, I suddenly got the urge to listen to it. That happens to me sometimes - I'll get a snatch of a song stuck in my head, and it jsut won't quit until I've heard it properly.
Anyway, I know it from the closing credits of Se7en, which at the time I had on video (and now have on DVD). I didn't fancy sitting in front of the TV, fastforwarding and rewinding the video just to hear the song, so I hit my PC to find some way of buying an electronic copy. CD would be no good - I needed to hear it *now*.
After an hour or so searching, I couldn't find a single site even willing to sell me music in mp3 (in the UK, at least), let alone that track. (This was after Napster had been sued into oblivion - I was a late comer to this party).
So, remembering what I'd read about p2p apps, I installed and fired up Kazaa. Within about 20 minutes I had the song, and was able to scratch that particular itch.
That was about 18 months ago, I'd guess, and I'm *still* not aware of an online, electronic music store that is willing to sell to the UK. There's a Coke run/sponsorsed one that's supposed to be starting tomorrow, so I'll give it a whirl, but I don't hold out much hope. For one thing, my tastes aren't really mainstream enough; for another, I've heard that it'll be 99p/track, making it roughly 75% more expensive than the much-touted 99c/track that most US services charge. Somehow, that just doesn't seem fair...
I don't think that anyone here assumes that (well, okay, maybe some). However, I personally assume that, for the majority of p2p networks at least, the number of people distributing infringing copies of stuff vastly outweighs the number of people like yourself.
Look at it this way - if the usage figures that some clients report are even vaguely accurate, then the chances of a significant proportion of it being non-infringing are, imho, miniscule.
Similarly, here in the UK, copying of audio (and video, of course) works for backup or media-shifting purposes is technically illegal without express permission from the copyright holder, and always has been.
Doesn't seem to stop anyone from doing it, though, and I can't imagine that it would ever be enforced.
Precisely his point.
An audience passively consumes what it is served.
So tell me, how much input do you get on which articles get posted and which rejected?
We passively consume the articles, occasionally getting our suggestions accepted. But the real active part only comes *after* the article is posted, and we get to discuss it. Even if the vast majority of us agreed that an article was crap, and should never have been posted, we couldn't change it one iota.
The way he goes on about CD keys, you'd think that they were the root of all gaming evils.
I don't read the site normally, so I have no idea how old the guy is, but surely he can't be so young as to not remember some of the hoops we had to jump through back in the old, 8 bit, tape-based days?
Hands up who remembers spending an hour or more fiddling with their tape deck to get Jet Set Willy to load? And then have to type in a particular colour code once it had loaded? Or the LensLok system that Elite used, where you held a very breakable plastic lens up to the screen to make a code readable? Some games even came with little hardware dongles.
He seems to think that it all started with Q3, when in reality, the computer games industry has been doing that sort of thing for about 20 years. Ubiquitous, high-speed net connections may well take it to the next level, but I can't see it being anywhere near as bad as he paints it. If that were true, it should've already been intolerable for a decade or so.
He's not defending the Saudi legal system, he's giving individual people the benefit of the doubt.
Just because a person isn't willing to sacrifice themself for the good of others, does not make them complicit. If that were the case, then we would all be just as guilty for sitting here in our nice homes, rather than travelling out there to help our oppressed fellow humans.
Oh and they sponsor terrorism
One word: NORAID.
It may not have been official, but a number of US administrations at least turned a blind eye to NORAID's fund-raising efforts.
You're confusing the regime, with individual citizens/subjects of the country. Or do you not think it possible that the majority of Saudi geeks deplore the regime under which they live, but can see no way to effect change?
Then there was Java, which traditionally has used Vi or EMACS as a sort of IDE.
I do hope you're joking - I've been a Java programmer for 3.5 years now, and while I certainly *could* use vi (and some of my colleagues do), I wouldn't choose to do so.
There are a great many proper IDEs available for developing Java, including Borland's JBuilder (which includes a free-as-in-beer version for personal use), netbeans (Free), eclipse (Free), AnyJ (free under Linux), etc.
Sure, you can use your favourite text editor and ant, but why make life difficult for yourself?
The web exploded - suddenly hundreds of thousands of dynamic sites, and sites with at least some dynamic content, sprang up in an amazingly short amount of time. The web was transformed from a purely flat, static medium to a dynamic one.
But mobile phones aren't static. The more modern ones can already run applications written in C/C++ or Java. Simply adding support for perl merely increases the number of people who could write code for them. The difference is nowhere near as great as CGI vs custom web server was.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, by any means. I just don't see it having quite the same degree of impact as the poster.
Oracle Embraces Mozilla... According to this article from eWeek, Oracle Corp. is ready to extend
Embrace? Extend? Danger, Will Robinson, danger!!
The papers i write are my property.
That's true in the general case, but if I were you, I'd dig out whatever agreement or contract you signed when you were accepted into your school/college/university and have a good read of the small print. I suspect you may find that you've signed copyright over to the institution on anything that you produce in the course of your studies.
gpl is all about the developer's rights. user access to code is a by-product.
I couldn't agree more. Lots of people here seem to confuse users and developers. I believe that I understand RMS's motivations for creating the GPL - to redress the perceived power imbalance between the technical elite (developers) and the technical 'underclass' (users). By allowing/enforcing free access to the source, everyone can make whatever changes they like.
All good in theory, but there's a snag - the vast majority of users can't make changes, even with the source. They neither know how to code, nor care, and in a lot of cases, quite possibly wouldn't be any good even if they were taught. That's not an insult - I'm a pretty good programmer, but, for example, can't sing, can't draw, and have very little "traditional" creative talent. I'll never be an artist, or a musician, or an athlete, and in the same way, most people will never be programmers.
That, I think, is something a lot of people forget - end-user access to the code is essentially irrelevant. It is just a byproduct of allowing developers access to it.
Let me get this straight:
Apple takes BSD code, incorporates it into a closed source, propretary operating system, and that's good.
Microsoft takes BSD code, incorporates it into a closed source, propretary operating system, and that's bad.
I'm not seeing a huge difference here...
I wonder if Apple would have gone that route if things weren't as free as BSD made them.
Well, there's got to be a reason why they chose to use BSD rather than Linux; my money is on the licensing.
That's true, but all it really means is that the malcontents will have to work harder. You don't really expect them to give up, do you?
The automatic updates tool only checks for critical updates, but no, it doesn't appear to rely on IE - at least, at no stage during notification, download or install does it invoke IE directly. It may rely on some networking component or other; I've not actually investigated it. It definitely doesn't open an IE window, though.