One thing you should probably be aware of is that owning a CD almost certainly allows you to make personal-use MP3's of it, but:
1. It probably doesn't allow you to download other MP3's without "buying" them. 2. It certainly doesn't allow you to offer those MP3's to others, in the general case.
Distribution is magic in copyright law. It is *NOT*, in the eyes of the law, the same thing to do something yourself as it is to have someone do it for you in cases of infringement.
If you want the law changed, great, I certainly won't be the one to try to stop you.
But, under the current law, the people trading MP3's are wrong, and the bands are right. Make your own MP3's from your own CD's.
It's always amazing how quickly slashdot can polarize on an issue. Gosh, sure is easy to hate those people who have something I want and aren't giving it to me cheap enough.
If the earth is about.008 sextillion metric tons lighter than we thought it was, the sun won't be able to hold us, and we'll go spinning off into the coldness of space.
WHY, oh WHY, couldn't they have left well enough alone?
"The map calling the territory black."
I always liked this idea...
on
Solving Chess?
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· Score: 2
So this guy goes away to "study chess". He comes back after 10 years, and announces that he has figured chess out. He signs up for a tournament, and sits down.
"Pawn to king's knight four. Mate in seventy-two."
"I don't know what banks will be programming in in twenty years, but they'll call it COBOL."
English has already won. Few, if any, languages have more phonemes, so very few languages can adopt words from as broad a base. English has no concept of linguistic purity; any pretensions to such were destroyed by the croissandwich.
I'm not sure if it's linguistic qualities, or the fact that the first country to get widespread net access was, roughly, an English-speaking one. Either way, it's already won.
The good news is, you're welcome to import new grammatical constructs, words, or whatever else from your favorite languages.
I don't think anything like Esperanto can ever have a chance; simply put, I don't think the fluid nature of natural languages is a misfeature, I think it's a feature, and unnatural languages never have that quality.
MacOS used to be consistent. Look at Quicktime 4. One of the most abysmally awful interfaces I've ever seen. It doesn't look like anything else, it doesn't work like anything else, hell, it doesn't even work like *ITSELF* from one window to another.
The NeXT and the Amiga were my two favorite examples of "consistent" interfaces. I miss them both horribly. (Apple ripped the 2nd mouse button out for MacOS X, I'm told, so the NeXT is truly gone from us now.)
Walnut Creek already had a support department in place (Hi, Chris!). The support departments are starting to get merged, so those of us on the BSDI side are learning our way around the FAQs for FreeBSD, and I think the FreeBSD folks are starting to learn BSD/OS.
For what it's worth, I'm a BSDI support rep, and I think this'll be a great deal. Most of us know a couple kinds of Unix, and 90% of support work is based on troubleshooting skills, not system-specific knowledge. You'd be amazed at how many calls are resolved with "Did this work before? What's changed since then? Is there a typo in that file?".
Anyway, this isn't "the first", but it's certainly going to get more publicity than the Walnut Creek support did, just because of marketing.
Other BSD's? I dunno. I believe OpenBSD's guy at Comdex was saying that some company with a name like "netsec" was doing support for OpenBSD. There are lots of consultants doing NetBSD support.
Obviously, you're all going to want to know whether BSD, Inc., is planning *BSD support in general. Anything I say on that could turn out to be wrong in the future; about all I can say is we don't have a press release announcing it, and we don't have a press release denying it. It is somewhere between "impossible" and "guaranteed". I will say nothing more, and I want you all to know that that doesn't mean we will, and doesn't mean we won't. Stop trying to second-guess me. I'm a professional support rep; if I want to talk for a paragraph without saying anything, I can, and you'll never get a useful shred of information from me I'm not willing to give out.
Consistency is a primary feature for most users; "easy" is often irrelevant, because beginners end up using a cheat sheet of some sort anyway. Consistency is one of the things that allows rapid learning, and is vital to the success of an interface among non-expert users. It's actually fairly valuable to experts, too.
GUI? CLI? Voice? Who cares! The key thing is that:
1. You can get a list of plausible options in most cases. The list may be a bunch of icons, any of which you can click on. It may be a dock. However, somewhere, there should be some kind of guide to what your choices are.
2. There will be cases where no such list can be made, because there are thousands of entries; in these cases, a little sorting goes a long way.
3. You must be able to pick an action unambiguously.
4. You must get feedback as to whether an action has succeeded or failed, and if it failed, you should get an indication of what prevented it.
5. You should be able to control the level of feedback based on your needs.
6. You should be able to abort unintended actions. Undo is nice, but abort is absolutely essential. For newbies, dangerous actions should come with a clearly labeled delay during which an abort will be harmless.
Most UI's try for some portion of some of these. Some attempts to make "easy" user interfaces end up falling down. How do you rename a file on a mac? Click on the name and wait a while, and it becomes a text box. However, if it can't be renamed, no one tells you, because there's no reason to believe that you really meant "rename", not just "select", and it would be stupid to give you the warning if you were just selecting a file.
This gives us also:
7. Explicit actions are preferable to implicit actions. You should always know what the computer thinks you're doing.
Except that they don't, so far as I can tell, ever throw out data. They keep all of it, even the "bad" results; the sums are still outside of a comfortable estimate of "chance" results.
They're not taking the "good" results. They're taking all the results, and analyzing how many of them are "good", but when they talk about overall results, they mean *all* the results, not just the ones they liked.
Completely fictional. Or rather, based off a completely fictionalized version of what happened to the kid who allegedly "snapped". He snapped, yeah, but it had more to do with drugs, and less to do with D&D. D&D did not figure in his snapping, nor did he go around thinking people were monsters.
There are people on both sides of this debate who are very strongly attached to their positions. Isn't this supposed to be science, and if so, shouldn't it be the results which determine our beliefs?
Anyway, I hear lots of "no one has duplicated this". I hear no one identifying the flaw. Could it be that the desire to not duplicate the result is good enough to suppress the result? I don't personally think any of this makes sense, but I'll accept an impossible experimental result a lot sooner than I'll accept the argument-from-current-beliefs.
You'd have to try a lot more experiments...
"Step 1.: Make two copies of reality. In one copy, the control group, we..."
I'm glad you have the special power of knowing how they would act if they had the option. Me, I'm forced to guess that they might sometimes be telling the truth, and that they may care about the "open" nature of Linux.
As long as "we" (the open source community) turn on our own like this, Microsoft has nothing to fear.
Do you think it matters all that much to them that the IPO tanked? The company isn't holding stock, it's selling it, and they *sold* it. They got their funding.
You sound as if you think they aren't respecting the GPL. Please to cite; what are they doing that violates it?
I love the way the "unified" Linux community turns on its own without even the justification of tough times. Come on, guys. Caldera's on *our* side; you can tell, 'cuz they aren't Microsoft.
Re:They could use one from the BSD variant.
on
QNX Crypt Cracked
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· Score: 2
No, they couldn't. Not if they're shipping internationally and it's two years ago when you simply *COULDN'T* export DES. Ever.
This is silly. Of course they *COULD* have used DES, if they had no need for an export audience.
No, these characters are not "in the public domain" because stuff involving them was sold. If someone were to take gcc, and start violating the license agreement and sell it, you'd be pissed, but the same argument you use to give yourself "rights" to Captain Kirk gives the hypothetical abuser that right.
It's not fair use. It's a copyright violation, and it's rude.
It's not "free advertising". It's theft.
Now, if you don't mind that, go ahead and write fanfic, and you're probably not gonna get sued. But don't pretend it's legal. It's one of the most disgusting things the fan community does; do something authors have asked you not to do, and invent new legal ideas to justify it, because the existing ones don't work.
So, I was asking about the WINE emulation, and someone emailed me saying he had a native Linux WP2K. Not WP2K Office. Just WP2K. I can't find any trace of it on their site or anything, but I'd love to have one, because I mostly want this for my BSD boxes.:)
I generally hope to buy from companies that are doing their best to be as efficient as possible. I'd rather spend 5% less, and buy something from a company that gives nothing to charity, then buy something from a company that makes a big deal about giving to charities. I'd rather pick my own charities, and I'd rather not support yet another layer of people who get paid to come between me and the recipients.
This doesn't mean I don't mind companies dumping toxic wastes...
Still, I find the most socially responsible thing I can think of is for a company to do its best to produce a good product, handle it efficiently, and not waste resources. If they do this, I am likely to end up with more time and money to spend doing the socially responsible things *I* care about.
What makes you think that $199 is a profitable number to sell this box at? I'd expect it's somewhat higher. Don't just look at what people pay for service, look at what Netpliance gets paid showing those people ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Real encryption has to assume that the bad guys already know the algorithm.
Remember, you're allowed to try to *obtain* a trade secret, and once you do, if you haven't agreed to anything, it's no longer a secret.
.exe, without running it or agreeing to anything, that's well and good.
Trade secrets enjoy very little legal protection, unlike other kinds of information. They can't sue you for infringement, for instance.
So, if someone is able to *extract* the information from the
Trade secrets are a poor form of "security".
One thing you should probably be aware of is that owning a CD almost certainly allows you to make personal-use MP3's of it, but:
1. It probably doesn't allow you to download other MP3's without "buying" them.
2. It certainly doesn't allow you to offer those MP3's to others, in the general case.
Distribution is magic in copyright law. It is *NOT*, in the eyes of the law, the same thing to do something yourself as it is to have someone do it for you in cases of infringement.
If you want the law changed, great, I certainly won't be the one to try to stop you.
But, under the current law, the people trading MP3's are wrong, and the bands are right. Make your own MP3's from your own CD's.
It's always amazing how quickly slashdot can polarize on an issue. Gosh, sure is easy to hate those people who have something I want and aren't giving it to me cheap enough.
If the earth is about .008 sextillion metric tons lighter than we thought it was, the sun won't be able to hold us, and we'll go spinning off into the coldness of space.
WHY, oh WHY, couldn't they have left well enough alone?
"The map calling the territory black."
So this guy goes away to "study chess". He comes back after 10 years, and announces that he has figured chess out. He signs up for a tournament, and sits down.
"Pawn to king's knight four. Mate in seventy-two."
That would be pretty freaky.
"I don't know what banks will be programming in in twenty years, but they'll call it COBOL."
English has already won. Few, if any, languages have more phonemes, so very few languages can adopt words from as broad a base. English has no concept of linguistic purity; any pretensions to such were destroyed by the croissandwich.
I'm not sure if it's linguistic qualities, or the fact that the first country to get widespread net access was, roughly, an English-speaking one. Either way, it's already won.
The good news is, you're welcome to import new grammatical constructs, words, or whatever else from your favorite languages.
I don't think anything like Esperanto can ever have a chance; simply put, I don't think the fluid nature of natural languages is a misfeature, I think it's a feature, and unnatural languages never have that quality.
My point is that, if there's an exception, the spooks *will* find it.
Sure, it's impossible. So is spooky action at a distance. So is FTL. So is heavier-than-air flight.
"impossible" is very hard to tell from "haven't done it yet" in physics.
The spooks will now devote substantial research to finding a way to observe particles *without* interacting with them.
MacOS used to be consistent. Look at Quicktime 4. One of the most abysmally awful interfaces I've ever seen. It doesn't look like anything else, it doesn't work like anything else, hell, it doesn't even work like *ITSELF* from one window to another.
The NeXT and the Amiga were my two favorite examples of "consistent" interfaces. I miss them both horribly. (Apple ripped the 2nd mouse button out for MacOS X, I'm told, so the NeXT is truly gone from us now.)
Walnut Creek already had a support department in place (Hi, Chris!). The support departments are starting to get merged, so those of us on the BSDI side are learning our way around the FAQs for FreeBSD, and I think the FreeBSD folks are starting to learn BSD/OS.
For what it's worth, I'm a BSDI support rep, and I think this'll be a great deal. Most of us know a couple kinds of Unix, and 90% of support work is based on troubleshooting skills, not system-specific knowledge. You'd be amazed at how many calls are resolved with "Did this work before? What's changed since then? Is there a typo in that file?".
Anyway, this isn't "the first", but it's certainly going to get more publicity than the Walnut Creek support did, just because of marketing.
Other BSD's? I dunno. I believe OpenBSD's guy at Comdex was saying that some company with a name like "netsec" was doing support for OpenBSD. There are lots of consultants doing NetBSD support.
Obviously, you're all going to want to know whether BSD, Inc., is planning *BSD support in general. Anything I say on that could turn out to be wrong in the future; about all I can say is we don't have a press release announcing it, and we don't have a press release denying it. It is somewhere between "impossible" and "guaranteed". I will say nothing more, and I want you all to know that that doesn't mean we will, and doesn't mean we won't. Stop trying to second-guess me. I'm a professional support rep; if I want to talk for a paragraph without saying anything, I can, and you'll never get a useful shred of information from me I'm not willing to give out.
Drive structures shouldn't be exposed? What, you think the computer knows how to correctly organize my files?
Should I be able to find a file without remembering where I put it? Certainly.
However, the drive structure has to be there, and I have to have the option of deciding how I want things sorted.
Consistency is a primary feature for most users; "easy" is often irrelevant, because beginners end up using a cheat sheet of some sort anyway. Consistency is one of the things that allows rapid learning, and is vital to the success of an interface among non-expert users. It's actually fairly valuable to experts, too.
GUI? CLI? Voice? Who cares! The key thing is that:
1. You can get a list of plausible options in most cases. The list may be a bunch of icons, any of which you can click on. It may be a dock. However, somewhere, there should be some kind of guide to what your choices are.
2. There will be cases where no such list can be made, because there are thousands of entries; in these cases, a little sorting goes a long way.
3. You must be able to pick an action unambiguously.
4. You must get feedback as to whether an action has succeeded or failed, and if it failed, you should get an indication of what prevented it.
5. You should be able to control the level of feedback based on your needs.
6. You should be able to abort unintended actions. Undo is nice, but abort is absolutely essential. For newbies, dangerous actions should come with a clearly labeled delay during which an abort will be harmless.
Most UI's try for some portion of some of these. Some attempts to make "easy" user interfaces end up falling down. How do you rename a file on a mac? Click on the name and wait a while, and it becomes a text box. However, if it can't be renamed, no one tells you, because there's no reason to believe that you really meant "rename", not just "select", and it would be stupid to give you the warning if you were just selecting a file.
This gives us also:
7. Explicit actions are preferable to implicit actions. You should always know what the computer thinks you're doing.
Except that they don't, so far as I can tell, ever throw out data. They keep all of it, even the "bad" results; the sums are still outside of a comfortable estimate of "chance" results.
They're not taking the "good" results. They're taking all the results, and analyzing how many of them are "good", but when they talk about overall results, they mean *all* the results, not just the ones they liked.
URL: http://mypage.direct.ca/c/crm114/dallas.html
I believe this to be a tolerably accurate summary of the issues in that case.
There are people on both sides of this debate who are very strongly attached to their positions. Isn't this supposed to be science, and if so, shouldn't it be the results which determine our beliefs?
Anyway, I hear lots of "no one has duplicated this". I hear no one identifying the flaw. Could it be that the desire to not duplicate the result is good enough to suppress the result? I don't personally think any of this makes sense, but I'll accept an impossible experimental result a lot sooner than I'll accept the argument-from-current-beliefs.
You'd have to try a lot more experiments...
"Step 1.: Make two copies of reality. In one copy, the control group, we..."
What would fascinate me is if skeptics *consistently* failed to reproduce these results...
Not new. Been around forever, so far as I can tell; I was using this in 8.8.5, and I didn't have to configure it at all. It just works.
I know where he got it: Apple ads.
I'm glad you have the special power of knowing how they would act if they had the option. Me, I'm forced to guess that they might sometimes be telling the truth, and that they may care about the "open" nature of Linux.
As long as "we" (the open source community) turn on our own like this, Microsoft has nothing to fear.
Do you think it matters all that much to them that the IPO tanked? The company isn't holding stock, it's selling it, and they *sold* it. They got their funding.
You sound as if you think they aren't respecting the GPL. Please to cite; what are they doing that violates it?
I love the way the "unified" Linux community turns on its own without even the justification of tough times. Come on, guys. Caldera's on *our* side; you can tell, 'cuz they aren't Microsoft.
No, they couldn't. Not if they're shipping internationally and it's two years ago when you simply *COULDN'T* export DES. Ever.
This is silly. Of course they *COULD* have used DES, if they had no need for an export audience.
There's a lot of bullshit happening here.
No, these characters are not "in the public domain" because stuff involving them was sold. If someone were to take gcc, and start violating the license agreement and sell it, you'd be pissed, but the same argument you use to give yourself "rights" to Captain Kirk gives the hypothetical abuser that right.
It's not fair use. It's a copyright violation, and it's rude.
It's not "free advertising". It's theft.
Now, if you don't mind that, go ahead and write fanfic, and you're probably not gonna get sued. But don't pretend it's legal. It's one of the most disgusting things the fan community does; do something authors have asked you not to do, and invent new legal ideas to justify it, because the existing ones don't work.
So, I was asking about the WINE emulation, and someone emailed me saying he had a native Linux WP2K. Not WP2K Office. Just WP2K. I can't find any trace of it on their site or anything, but I'd love to have one, because I mostly want this for my BSD boxes. :)
Anyone heard anything like this?
I generally hope to buy from companies that are doing their best to be as efficient as possible. I'd rather spend 5% less, and buy something from a company that gives nothing to charity, then buy something from a company that makes a big deal about giving to charities. I'd rather pick my own charities, and I'd rather not support yet another layer of people who get paid to come between me and the recipients.
This doesn't mean I don't mind companies dumping toxic wastes...
Still, I find the most socially responsible thing I can think of is for a company to do its best to produce a good product, handle it efficiently, and not waste resources. If they do this, I am likely to end up with more time and money to spend doing the socially responsible things *I* care about.
What makes you think that $199 is a profitable number to sell this box at? I'd expect it's somewhat higher. Don't just look at what people pay for service, look at what Netpliance gets paid showing those people ads.