Speaking of which, there was much discussion about XP activation keys. Speculation was that MS would eventually remove the activation code from XP at some point. It looks like we're not at that point yet. If MS removed the product activation requirement from XP now they would have a much harder time growing the Vista base. "It's new and I need the nice new features," doesn't justify switching from XP to ME II for most people.
I don't know about the rest of the world but in the US:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,... nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself...
If there is information someone has hidden, then absent OTHER evidence of criminal activity, well that's just too bad. It's up to the prosecution or the police or whoever to find that other evidence. Putting prior restraint or casting suspicion on what anyone does with their own data because some day it might be evidence of something is just wrong. Our rights continue to be chipped away.
If there's one state that would do this it would be New Jersey. If they had everything they wanted they would prefer the RFID chip be implanted under the skin. They love restricting access to their beaches.
Out of all the places I've lived the one with the most anti-privacy attitude and laws is without a doubt New Jersey.
15 years ago some of us were asking ATI for OS/2 Warp drivers. *rim shot*
It would be poetic justice if ATI put Dell on hold for an hour every time they called to check in on those drivers. Then transferred them to 3 different parties before cutting them off.
In fact, if ATI promises to do that I will forgive them for the OS/2 lies and bogus promises they made.
This guy is waging a one-man show against GPL violators. Oh, the EFF is involved to some extent, but their effort is not Harald's. Harald, by the way, is the lead on the ipfilters project, something many/.'ers have probably heard of.
He is swamped with submissions from folks claiming this company or that is in violation of the GPL. I submitted one myself about a year and a half ago. Nothing ever came of it. Not because the company is innocent, but because Harald has very few resources to go after the perpetrators of GPL license abuse. When a company gets reported he has to physically buy the item - most violators seem to be in the embedded Linux area - and verify the GPL violations before putting the lawyer(s) on them. He has scored some notable successes.
But he is basically pissing into the wind. For every successful case he pursues there are 10 more that go unpunished. The real people who should be up in arms against commercial violators of the GPL are the authors who hold the copyright on the code being misused.
Sadly, most of them can't be bothered and the violations go on. This will be the end of the GPL: developers who do not care to enforce their rights. Not v3 or v4, or Linus or Stallman or tiny paragraphs in section 1. At some point there will be a case where an evildoer will use the defense that since the copyright holder didn't pursue company X 5 years ago they should be prevented from trying to do it now. And poof! The copyright will vanish or be declared null and void and with it the GPL distribution license that goes along with it.
Hooray for Harald! Watch out for the backspray, Harald.
A LOT of the DRM fear is justified. Most people's existing movie files will still work. That is true because the DRM protections kick in only when playing "premium content". The downside isn't just the DRM protections, it's the DRM methodology and processes. They ALWAYS run in the background sucking processor cycles and memory to continuously monitor for that "premium content". Regardless of whether you have any or not.
Another DRM thorn is writing drivers or code for any device that potentially could be used to deliver the "premium" content. Things like display drivers or sound drivers. Even if you don't care about the "premium" content, even if you have no use for it whatsoever, you are forced, as a developer, to deal with Vista's restrictions on it.
Vista, aka Windows ME II, is strange. I think it's not being adopted more than MS is letting on, at least with existing installed systems. The growth will be pretty much limited to pre-installs on new PCs AFACT.
Another weird thing: everyone and their mother recommended waiting for the first Service Pack before taking the plunge. It was accepted as common knowledge that MS was working furiously on Vista SP1. "A few months", is what I heard early in January. Now here we are 6 months later and not a peep.
Personally, I went out and bought another 2 copies of XP Professional for future use. Vista? No thanks, no way, no how.
Markets in China are supremely important to all US business interests. The foundation of capitalism is businesses must grow. As barriers to growth pop up both here and in other markets, new opportunities must be found. There are 1 billion people in China. So it's not just Microsoft who sees the importance of markets in China. It's every company that ever had a widget to sell. It has become a great concern to the US government, too. Business interests and growing markets drives US policy these days, like it or not (see Iraqi petroleum). These concerns trump everything else. 50 years ago there would have been a hue and cry over such massive trade deals with Communists *gasp*. You don't hear that today.
China could change its form of government tomorrow to a representative democracy with free elections at all levels in every area, but if they tried to close down their borders with respect to trade the US would find a reason to go to war with them. The way it stands today that's not about to happen.
I have carefully refused all attempts to get me to "upgrade". Nevertheless, the thing that ticks me off is the setting in the program's preferences that sets the frequency the program waits before phoning home to check for updates and new versions. I have had that set to NEVER for over 2 years but it didn't stop the notices that Yahoo was taking over MM Jukebox.
Some freaking ethics. You tell it not to phone home and it does it anyway. I guess it has been doing so all along. That setting is more like a 'severity' level for displaying their spammy drek.
And don't kid yourself, there's plenty not to like about MM Jukebox, although most of my complaints center on the user interface and the way they scatter secret "upgrade now" menu items and buttons all over the place.
A pox on Yahoo's house. Now that MM Jukebox has been discontinues I think I'll reverse-engineer a key for it. No use being bothered to register a program that can no longer be registered.
Under cyberattack? Disconnect from the network at large. Is that too hard? If a system of national importance hasn't been designed to allow for operation while disconnected from the network, then that system needs to be redesigned.
Most of this cyberwar bullshit is just that: bullshit. It's a way for the Pentagon to funnel money to private interests without any meaningful oversight, since most of these programs are classified. They won't talk about it in public, so how is the public supposed to judge the real risks?
What are the risks? We can't tell you. How many attacks have there been already, and when? We can't tell you. How much are you spending on this? We can't tell you. I think you're blowing smoke up my ass. Trust us.
Bullshit. Without a candid assessment of the risks - in public - this is nothing more than another way to put money into the pockets of DoD, NSA and CIA contractors. The same people who are big contriutors to certain political causes.
As in loose your ability spell. Most people who spell 'lose' this way prolly never learned to spell in the first place. It drives me up a wall every time I see it.
No. I will never switch to Vista, and you can't make me. It is my computer and I will determine what programs run on it. Windows ME II... I mean Vista... will only be allowed through my front door when I have no other choice. As long as I have a choice, DRM-ridden crap will never run on my computer.
Is there any Federal Department of Agency that deserves to be shut down more than the Department of Homeland Security? It's nothing but a big hole we pour money into. It's one of the most incompetent departments ever created as far as executing their mission.
Not only that, we already had a department for securing the "homeland": it's called the Department of Defense.
The ironic thing is that this Department was created during the tenure of a Republican president and a Republican congress, and it has been primarily the Republican party over the last 25 years decrying big government, fraud, and wasteful spending.
It's to our detriment, but not really surprising. Science is not "cool". Research and development engineering draws on scientific advancement and that's been de-emphasized by American companies in a big way. It's viewed as a cost center and not a profit center. Many of the advances claimed by scienctific research, like physics, are intangible. If it can't be made to show a profit next quarter, who needs it? (sarcasm)
If we're ever going to find advanced technology - the stuff of science fiction today - the groundwork for those discoveries is going to come from physics research. Too many people seem to think that a guy in his garage is going to stumble upon the answer to gravity by accident, and that scientific research on a grand scale is nothing more than an entitlement program where there's a political agenda involved.
A threat to economic growth, if anything, but hardly a threat to Democracy. Democracy requires people have access to facts so they can make reasoned choices. When facts are in short supply things get really out of whack, as we're finding out in the good ol' US of A.
A better question might be, does scientific 'consensus' carry the same weight as the results of scientific experiments? The latter is objective truth while the former is an educated guess from people who have been highly educated. Not the same thing.
10%? Good one! Try a third. If lawyers only sucked off 10% we would (arguably) be better off. It's the juicy 33% that keeps 'em salivating over good cases against foes with deep pockets.
I'm in the US, so things are a bit different. Apathy is the same. Here, we have our rights enshrined in a Constitution. In Britain everything is based on tradition and the consent of the Crown rather than a written document, unless you go back to the Magna Carta. I could be wrong on that so flame gently if required.
Nevertheless, when the most sacred and cherished documents in history are trashed by a government of men (British or American) over a period of years, apathy sets in the longer it goes on without anyone doing anything about it. When the key documents are shat upon, I, for one, lose respect for every written rule, law, regulation and contract. Writing isn't worth the paper it's written on.
I don't go around breaking contracts because I believe a person's word is their bond and carries honor. Everything else, however, is debatable IMO.
I've been doing it since the early OS/2 days. The victory of Windows over OS/2 cemented a lot of bad practices firmly into place IMO. New "technology" was whatever the MS buzzword of the day was. None of it ever really examined the benefits of parallel programming and multi-threading. Another reason it's not particularly widespread is because it doesn't lend itself well to seat-of-the-pants on-the-fly coding. The old adage that "the documentation is the code" doesn't cut it when you absolutely have to buckle down and do some design work at the outset to partition the problem and decide how the different threads and/or processes are going to interact with each other. Things like avoiding deadlocks through synchronization mechanisms and such simply have to be documented, and nobody likes to write documentation.
I'm in the same boat. Been tempted many times to start playing EVE. Stories like this turn me off totally. It reminds me of a verbal confrontation I had recently in an office building I went to visit. Walked in one door with a company escort, not once but twice in the morning. After lunch, going back into the same building with the same company escort we encountered a security dude who insisted I had to sign in at the desk and be entered into "the system" and get a visitor's badge. We argued for a bit. Eventually I got back in but about an hour was wasted of my escort's time.
In the end, I realized it wasn't the security dude's fault for doing his job. It wasn't even the security rules and procedures that ticked me off. It was the inconsistent application of the rules. Especially when my escort told me that the previous week had a "Bring Your Brat to Work" day and none of the dozens of kids who came in were ever required to be entered into "the system" to gain access to the building.
I think it's safe to say that if CCP was a US corporation they would have already been sued out of existence.
As long as prices fall quickly I don't give a rat's ass which format "wins". My motives are selfish. I have a bunch of old videotapes I want to archive. I thought DV was the answer, and it is to a point. But even though DV is a decent compression method, once I archived a few dozen tapes I found I was STILL reluctant to trash the old VHS/Hi-8 analog tapes.
I want enough space on a burnable disc so I can capture all my video (all SD and all lo-fi) with a lossless scheme. Only THEN will I toss my old tapes and not give it a second thought. Then I can experiment with different codecs until the cows come home and know I didn't sacrifice anything from the originals. I'll probably only actually do that on a handfull of the recordings I have, but hey, you never know. Someday one of my grandkids-to-be might develop an intense interest in a vacation I took years ago to Wally World. More likely is that all my precious footage will end up in a landfill somewhere. Such is the life of a pack rat.
Here in NY there has been a ban on using cell phones while driving for several years. It's never enforced, and odds are if you see someone weaving or going too slow or being generally careless they're just as likely to be yakking on their phone as they are to be drunk behind the wheel. The last 4 times I almost got hit in local parking lots, there was some idiot talking on their phone and not paying attention to their driving.
It's unbelievable how, when faced with laws already on the books that don't work and aren't enforced, the reaction of lawmakers is to pass more of the same. Granted, WA is not NY, but the politician problem is universal I think.
And they can't make me, no matter what they think, no matter how hard they try.
Here's where ads are headed IMO... Ever notice how when you're watching something on TV, when a commercial comes on and you surf to another channel... the other channel is also showing a commercial? Not all the time, but often. I think soon we'll have standardized commercial break times that broadcasters will be required to use. Industry lobbying will get this put into place to make damn well sure everyone sees at least a commercial (no honor among thieves), if not the one they want to show them. With standard commercial times, the incentive to click away for a minute or two will be less.
At first this will happen on an honor system among broadcasters and producers who will see to it that the natural "break times" in a program occur in accordance with the standard times. Soon after that the Congress will be bribed by lobbyists to pass legislation that forces adherence to the scheduled break times. They'll call it the "Consumer Rights Advertising Plan".
In the early Windows vs OS/2 days PC Magazine (different owner/publisher then) was guilty of bending its editorial views towards its largest advertisers. It was part of the reason that Windows ultimately gained momentum that couldn't be stopped. Notice I said "part of the reason", because it wasn't the only one by far. In more ways than one this is not news.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of which, there was much discussion about XP activation keys. Speculation was that MS would eventually remove the activation code from XP at some point. It looks like we're not at that point yet. If MS removed the product activation requirement from XP now they would have a much harder time growing the Vista base. "It's new and I need the nice new features," doesn't justify switching from XP to ME II for most people.
If there is information someone has hidden, then absent OTHER evidence of criminal activity, well that's just too bad. It's up to the prosecution or the police or whoever to find that other evidence. Putting prior restraint or casting suspicion on what anyone does with their own data because some day it might be evidence of something is just wrong. Our rights continue to be chipped away.
If there's one state that would do this it would be New Jersey. If they had everything they wanted they would prefer the RFID chip be implanted under the skin. They love restricting access to their beaches.
Out of all the places I've lived the one with the most anti-privacy attitude and laws is without a doubt New Jersey.
15 years ago some of us were asking ATI for OS/2 Warp drivers. *rim shot*
It would be poetic justice if ATI put Dell on hold for an hour every time they called to check in on those drivers. Then transferred them to 3 different parties before cutting them off.
In fact, if ATI promises to do that I will forgive them for the OS/2 lies and bogus promises they made.
This guy is waging a one-man show against GPL violators. Oh, the EFF is involved to some extent, but their effort is not Harald's. Harald, by the way, is the lead on the ipfilters project, something many /.'ers have probably heard of.
He is swamped with submissions from folks claiming this company or that is in violation of the GPL. I submitted one myself about a year and a half ago. Nothing ever came of it. Not because the company is innocent, but because Harald has very few resources to go after the perpetrators of GPL license abuse. When a company gets reported he has to physically buy the item - most violators seem to be in the embedded Linux area - and verify the GPL violations before putting the lawyer(s) on them. He has scored some notable successes.
But he is basically pissing into the wind. For every successful case he pursues there are 10 more that go unpunished. The real people who should be up in arms against commercial violators of the GPL are the authors who hold the copyright on the code being misused.
Sadly, most of them can't be bothered and the violations go on. This will be the end of the GPL: developers who do not care to enforce their rights. Not v3 or v4, or Linus or Stallman or tiny paragraphs in section 1. At some point there will be a case where an evildoer will use the defense that since the copyright holder didn't pursue company X 5 years ago they should be prevented from trying to do it now. And poof! The copyright will vanish or be declared null and void and with it the GPL distribution license that goes along with it.
Hooray for Harald! Watch out for the backspray, Harald.
A LOT of the DRM fear is justified. Most people's existing movie files will still work. That is true because the DRM protections kick in only when playing "premium content". The downside isn't just the DRM protections, it's the DRM methodology and processes. They ALWAYS run in the background sucking processor cycles and memory to continuously monitor for that "premium content". Regardless of whether you have any or not.
Another DRM thorn is writing drivers or code for any device that potentially could be used to deliver the "premium" content. Things like display drivers or sound drivers. Even if you don't care about the "premium" content, even if you have no use for it whatsoever, you are forced, as a developer, to deal with Vista's restrictions on it.
It adds up to less choice.
Vista, aka Windows ME II, is strange. I think it's not being adopted more than MS is letting on, at least with existing installed systems. The growth will be pretty much limited to pre-installs on new PCs AFACT.
Another weird thing: everyone and their mother recommended waiting for the first Service Pack before taking the plunge. It was accepted as common knowledge that MS was working furiously on Vista SP1. "A few months", is what I heard early in January. Now here we are 6 months later and not a peep.
Personally, I went out and bought another 2 copies of XP Professional for future use. Vista? No thanks, no way, no how.
Markets in China are supremely important to all US business interests. The foundation of capitalism is businesses must grow. As barriers to growth pop up both here and in other markets, new opportunities must be found. There are 1 billion people in China. So it's not just Microsoft who sees the importance of markets in China. It's every company that ever had a widget to sell. It has become a great concern to the US government, too. Business interests and growing markets drives US policy these days, like it or not (see Iraqi petroleum). These concerns trump everything else. 50 years ago there would have been a hue and cry over such massive trade deals with Communists *gasp*. You don't hear that today.
China could change its form of government tomorrow to a representative democracy with free elections at all levels in every area, but if they tried to close down their borders with respect to trade the US would find a reason to go to war with them. The way it stands today that's not about to happen.
I have carefully refused all attempts to get me to "upgrade". Nevertheless, the thing that ticks me off is the setting in the program's preferences that sets the frequency the program waits before phoning home to check for updates and new versions. I have had that set to NEVER for over 2 years but it didn't stop the notices that Yahoo was taking over MM Jukebox.
Some freaking ethics. You tell it not to phone home and it does it anyway. I guess it has been doing so all along. That setting is more like a 'severity' level for displaying their spammy drek.
And don't kid yourself, there's plenty not to like about MM Jukebox, although most of my complaints center on the user interface and the way they scatter secret "upgrade now" menu items and buttons all over the place.
A pox on Yahoo's house. Now that MM Jukebox has been discontinues I think I'll reverse-engineer a key for it. No use being bothered to register a program that can no longer be registered.
Where's my mod points when I need them?
Under cyberattack? Disconnect from the network at large. Is that too hard? If a system of national importance hasn't been designed to allow for operation while disconnected from the network, then that system needs to be redesigned.
Most of this cyberwar bullshit is just that: bullshit. It's a way for the Pentagon to funnel money to private interests without any meaningful oversight, since most of these programs are classified. They won't talk about it in public, so how is the public supposed to judge the real risks?
What are the risks? We can't tell you.
How many attacks have there been already, and when? We can't tell you.
How much are you spending on this? We can't tell you.
I think you're blowing smoke up my ass. Trust us.
Bullshit. Without a candid assessment of the risks - in public - this is nothing more than another way to put money into the pockets of DoD, NSA and CIA contractors. The same people who are big contriutors to certain political causes.
As in loose your ability spell. Most people who spell 'lose' this way prolly never learned to spell in the first place. It drives me up a wall every time I see it.
No. I will never switch to Vista, and you can't make me. It is my computer and I will determine what programs run on it. Windows ME II ... I mean Vista... will only be allowed through my front door when I have no other choice. As long as I have a choice, DRM-ridden crap will never run on my computer.
Is there any Federal Department of Agency that deserves to be shut down more than the Department of Homeland Security? It's nothing but a big hole we pour money into. It's one of the most incompetent departments ever created as far as executing their mission.
Not only that, we already had a department for securing the "homeland": it's called the Department of Defense.
The ironic thing is that this Department was created during the tenure of a Republican president and a Republican congress, and it has been primarily the Republican party over the last 25 years decrying big government, fraud, and wasteful spending.
It's to our detriment, but not really surprising. Science is not "cool". Research and development engineering draws on scientific advancement and that's been de-emphasized by American companies in a big way. It's viewed as a cost center and not a profit center. Many of the advances claimed by scienctific research, like physics, are intangible. If it can't be made to show a profit next quarter, who needs it? (sarcasm)
If we're ever going to find advanced technology - the stuff of science fiction today - the groundwork for those discoveries is going to come from physics research. Too many people seem to think that a guy in his garage is going to stumble upon the answer to gravity by accident, and that scientific research on a grand scale is nothing more than an entitlement program where there's a political agenda involved.
Yep, we're fucked.
A threat to economic growth, if anything, but hardly a threat to Democracy. Democracy requires people have access to facts so they can make reasoned choices. When facts are in short supply things get really out of whack, as we're finding out in the good ol' US of A.
A better question might be, does scientific 'consensus' carry the same weight as the results of scientific experiments? The latter is objective truth while the former is an educated guess from people who have been highly educated. Not the same thing.
10%? Good one! Try a third. If lawyers only sucked off 10% we would (arguably) be better off. It's the juicy 33% that keeps 'em salivating over good cases against foes with deep pockets.
Anyone who thinks their TV is more critical in their life than a computer deserves what they get.
I'm in the US, so things are a bit different. Apathy is the same. Here, we have our rights enshrined in a Constitution. In Britain everything is based on tradition and the consent of the Crown rather than a written document, unless you go back to the Magna Carta. I could be wrong on that so flame gently if required.
Nevertheless, when the most sacred and cherished documents in history are trashed by a government of men (British or American) over a period of years, apathy sets in the longer it goes on without anyone doing anything about it. When the key documents are shat upon, I, for one, lose respect for every written rule, law, regulation and contract. Writing isn't worth the paper it's written on.
I don't go around breaking contracts because I believe a person's word is their bond and carries honor. Everything else, however, is debatable IMO.
I've been doing it since the early OS/2 days. The victory of Windows over OS/2 cemented a lot of bad practices firmly into place IMO. New "technology" was whatever the MS buzzword of the day was. None of it ever really examined the benefits of parallel programming and multi-threading. Another reason it's not particularly widespread is because it doesn't lend itself well to seat-of-the-pants on-the-fly coding. The old adage that "the documentation is the code" doesn't cut it when you absolutely have to buckle down and do some design work at the outset to partition the problem and decide how the different threads and/or processes are going to interact with each other. Things like avoiding deadlocks through synchronization mechanisms and such simply have to be documented, and nobody likes to write documentation.
I'm in the same boat. Been tempted many times to start playing EVE. Stories like this turn me off totally. It reminds me of a verbal confrontation I had recently in an office building I went to visit. Walked in one door with a company escort, not once but twice in the morning. After lunch, going back into the same building with the same company escort we encountered a security dude who insisted I had to sign in at the desk and be entered into "the system" and get a visitor's badge. We argued for a bit. Eventually I got back in but about an hour was wasted of my escort's time.
In the end, I realized it wasn't the security dude's fault for doing his job. It wasn't even the security rules and procedures that ticked me off. It was the inconsistent application of the rules. Especially when my escort told me that the previous week had a "Bring Your Brat to Work" day and none of the dozens of kids who came in were ever required to be entered into "the system" to gain access to the building.
I think it's safe to say that if CCP was a US corporation they would have already been sued out of existence.
As long as prices fall quickly I don't give a rat's ass which format "wins". My motives are selfish. I have a bunch of old videotapes I want to archive. I thought DV was the answer, and it is to a point. But even though DV is a decent compression method, once I archived a few dozen tapes I found I was STILL reluctant to trash the old VHS/Hi-8 analog tapes.
I want enough space on a burnable disc so I can capture all my video (all SD and all lo-fi) with a lossless scheme. Only THEN will I toss my old tapes and not give it a second thought. Then I can experiment with different codecs until the cows come home and know I didn't sacrifice anything from the originals. I'll probably only actually do that on a handfull of the recordings I have, but hey, you never know. Someday one of my grandkids-to-be might develop an intense interest in a vacation I took years ago to Wally World. More likely is that all my precious footage will end up in a landfill somewhere. Such is the life of a pack rat.
Here in NY there has been a ban on using cell phones while driving for several years. It's never enforced, and odds are if you see someone weaving or going too slow or being generally careless they're just as likely to be yakking on their phone as they are to be drunk behind the wheel. The last 4 times I almost got hit in local parking lots, there was some idiot talking on their phone and not paying attention to their driving.
It's unbelievable how, when faced with laws already on the books that don't work and aren't enforced, the reaction of lawmakers is to pass more of the same. Granted, WA is not NY, but the politician problem is universal I think.
And they can't make me, no matter what they think, no matter how hard they try.
Here's where ads are headed IMO... Ever notice how when you're watching something on TV, when a commercial comes on and you surf to another channel... the other channel is also showing a commercial? Not all the time, but often. I think soon we'll have standardized commercial break times that broadcasters will be required to use. Industry lobbying will get this put into place to make damn well sure everyone sees at least a commercial (no honor among thieves), if not the one they want to show them. With standard commercial times, the incentive to click away for a minute or two will be less.
At first this will happen on an honor system among broadcasters and producers who will see to it that the natural "break times" in a program occur in accordance with the standard times. Soon after that the Congress will be bribed by lobbyists to pass legislation that forces adherence to the scheduled break times. They'll call it the "Consumer Rights Advertising Plan".
In the early Windows vs OS/2 days PC Magazine (different owner/publisher then) was guilty of bending its editorial views towards its largest advertisers. It was part of the reason that Windows ultimately gained momentum that couldn't be stopped. Notice I said "part of the reason", because it wasn't the only one by far. In more ways than one this is not news.