>> Hitler hated the communists with a passion for the same reasons you hate communism
Interesting comment. Do you hate Communism?
I just see Nazism and Communism as different flavors of the same thing. Both are totalitarian. Both murdered tens of millions of people over the last century. Once those two facts are understood, arguing over the finer points seems a tad indulgent.
Nazism, Communism, Socialism, Fascism are all left-wing ideologies in that they advocate increased government control over social and economic activities in the name of greater equality. The Jews weren't singled out because Hitler thought Yarmulkes looked funny, they were singled out because they were the business class of the era. Nazi propaganda portrayed Jews as plotting to gain a monopoly on the world's banking system.... pretty much the same kind of scare stories we read in Slashdot, albeit not directed at Jews. Nazis played to the same working-class fears as every other socialist movement.
The fact that Fascists and Nazis evolved into cruel leftists doesn't make them any less leftist.
Well, those are certainly more restrictive terms than most Free Software licenses impose. I've used software that was beer-free for non-commercial use, but where they charged a fee for commercial use... that's commercial sofwtare to me.
If Linux or *BSD had been licensed on such terms, they would have languished in obscurity.
Well, yes, but if you've created a piece of Intellectual Property, it doesn't matter how small the offense is, it kind of stings.
What I find more ironic is that this is coming up in the context of Free Software advocacy. Shucks, people freely share code that they spent hundreds of hours of their time on.... how about some artists doing the same?
Remember, the fines are also an ongoing source of revenue for politicians. They don't want "change" any more than Microsoft does... they want a chance to score a few billion every now and then. Microsoft is a source of cash, and that's what drives it. Microsoft could "change" however you wanted... as long as they have money, there will be people who need to prove their power by taking some of it. Being nice is not sufficient to fend off lawsuits.
Fines and lawsuits aren't solutions, they're symptoms.
That might work if all channels cost the same, but they don't. But if ESPN is $5, HBO is $10, and OLN is $1, you can't sell them as a package without undermining the a la carte pricing.
What you might get is a system that provides a la carte pricing, but which would only save money for people who bought one or two channels. Everybody else would be better off with a discounted package, same as you have now.
I suppose if that came to pass, it wouldn't disrupt the smaller channels so much, simply because so few would switch to the a la carte pricing. But then what's the point of the whole exercise if all we're going to do is offer options that hardly anybody wants?
I was thinking more along the lines of... CNN and Fox and MSNBC would raise holy hell if they didn't get included in everybody's basic service bundle, forcing Congress to grant them an exemption in order to shut them up.
Mostly what will happen is that the small channels will go out of business, or be bought out by the bigger ones. There's a chikcen & egg problem with niche channels, because they need to sell advertising. The dual-revenue model (subscription fees + ads) only works for established stations like ESPN, or those who can piggyback on bundled packages to get distribution.
The likely scenario if a la carte were mandatory would be for major channels to acquire smaller ones, then shift some key programming over to the smaller channel in hopes of building the subscriber base. If that didn't work, they'd just shut it down and cherry-pick the programming.
A la carte sounds nice, until you realize that the menu will change once it goes into effect. If I could pick and choose amomg existing channels, it might be one thing. But that won't be the choice once reality hits home.
And for that matter, this sort of price regulation inevitably makes it illegal to offer certain discounts... they couldn't do a "buy ESPN & CNN, and get another channel for free" for example, without reducing the base price of the individual channels. Most likely, they'd have to break out a base "service cost", so out of your $40 cable bill, they'll say that $30 of it is technology overhead and $10 is programming. Or $10/$30, depending on which is more profitable. Don't worry, the FCC will play right along with whatever they request.
And expect the news and political channels to get an exemption.
Meanwhile, this is about the third time in a row that Congress has promised to lower our cable bill in an election year. How many times are we gonna fall for it?
Having decent IT management makes all the difference.
Some are little more than PHB's who listen to what management asks for, and tells the techs to do it, no matter how little sense it makes. Some think that becasue IT folks are on salary, then their time is free. They just want to shift the blame off their shoulders onto somebody else's. Typically, they're hated by both users and techs.
On the other hand, some are proactive among management, they don't let the users design the system, and they care about how much time is spent solving a problem, and they care about the quality of the solution. These managers are loved by both the customers and the techs.
My guess is that about 1 in 7 IT managers are the latter type, and they're the ones with the happy staff.
What's most astonishing is that people continue to advocate moving more of the economy under government control, and implementing "reforms" that will somehow make the process work honestly.
Like that's never been tried before.
The only way to get the money out of politics is to get the money out of government. As long as there are goodies and privileges to be given out, people will find a way to buy them.
The thing about "using" water is that... well, after you use it, it's still water. You can dump chemicals into, you can shit in it, it's still water. So it's hard to say that it's "consumed." Really it's just dirtied, and can be cleaned and turned back into clean water somehwat more easily than, say, replacing oil that was burned.
Well, it's a little bit of an oversimplification to contrast "centrally designed" software with OSS. Centralized control is bad for an economy, because an economy is made up of people with varying goals. But when there is a common goal, centralized control can be a good thing. Think military, sports teams, etc. Or designing a huge application.
But.... IP law, even though it's perceived as "pro-business," is a broadly socialist concept; the government grants arbirary privileges that a copyright owner could not enforce by themselves. In this sense, government already regulates the software market. The failures of the current scheme should not be used to justify extending government control.
The emergence of Free Software is a market response to overpriced proprietary software, to API's designed to generate consumer and developer lock-in, and to the anti-consumer license provisions that it leads to.
Free Software and proprietary between them cover the market well, and it's probably the best compromise we can come up with. In other words, don't expect commercial software to ever be as nice as you want it to be. Just make sure that Free remains Free.
Considering that what it does is record the shows to an MPEG or WMV file, the answer here would be yes. Even better, it can use third-party capture/encoding cards (WinTV-PVR), so it doesn't even touch the program stream (although it can use software encoding too).
If you record in MPEG2, you can use something like TMPEG to drop it onto a DVD without re-encoding.
What's funny is that the review didn't mention the coolest feature, which is the remote scheduling through snapstream.net. It's just a regular TV listings page, and a free account comes with the software. You can click to record a show, and the PVR checks in every ten minutes or so for additions, and adds them to the schedule. It's just an outbound HTTP connection, so it works through a firewall without exposing anything.
The net result is that if I'm away from home and hear about a show I want to record, I can set it up it in seconds from any web browser on the 'net. Try that with your Tivo.
This was a fairly shaky product in early versions, but it's really developed into something useful. I'd never go back to a VCR.
No shit. I once had a webcam on a bird's nest, and it would save 10K images/day. I wanted to find the pics of the eggs hatching and babies poking their heads out (lame, I know, but the women in Marketing loved it). I had some app that would display them in sequence as fast as it could load them, and I'd just let it run and watch for movement. Even so, it took about two hours to cycle through a day's pics, and I didn't have time left over to, um, take advantage of the good will I had generated.
By allowing the industry to move ahead instead of waiting around while the FCC repeatedly tweaks it rules. From a WSJ editorial:
This time around the judges' frustration at being ignored was palpable. Instead of remanding the issue back for yet another turn on the FCC's merry-go-round, the court vacated the rules after 60 days pending motions to reconsider. "This deadline is appropriate," said the court, "in light of the Commission's failure, after eight years, to develop lawful unbundling rules, and its apparent unwillingness to adhere to prior judicial rulings."
Slashdot Mirror
>> Hitler hated the communists with a passion for the same reasons you hate communism
Interesting comment. Do you hate Communism?
I just see Nazism and Communism as different flavors of the same thing. Both are totalitarian. Both murdered tens of millions of people over the last century. Once those two facts are understood, arguing over the finer points seems a tad indulgent.
Nazism, Communism, Socialism, Fascism are all left-wing ideologies in that they advocate increased government control over social and economic activities in the name of greater equality. The Jews weren't singled out because Hitler thought Yarmulkes looked funny, they were singled out because they were the business class of the era. Nazi propaganda portrayed Jews as plotting to gain a monopoly on the world's banking system.... pretty much the same kind of scare stories we read in Slashdot, albeit not directed at Jews. Nazis played to the same working-class fears as every other socialist movement.
The fact that Fascists and Nazis evolved into cruel leftists doesn't make them any less leftist.
Finally, a Home Test that /.ers can make good use of. Unlike those Home Pregnancy Tests, this seems to really arouse some passions.
There are a lot of ways to spin it.
On is to use a headline that says:
"Justice Department Censors ACLU Web Site"
Another could be:
"Court Rules ACLU Violated Anti-Terror Law"
What's important is being able to recognize when somebody's spinning you.
Well, those are certainly more restrictive terms than most Free Software licenses impose. I've used software that was beer-free for non-commercial use, but where they charged a fee for commercial use... that's commercial sofwtare to me.
If Linux or *BSD had been licensed on such terms, they would have languished in obscurity.
>> it was just a flash intro on the website
Well, yes, but if you've created a piece of Intellectual Property, it doesn't matter how small the offense is, it kind of stings.
What I find more ironic is that this is coming up in the context of Free Software advocacy. Shucks, people freely share code that they spent hundreds of hours of their time on.... how about some artists doing the same?
Looking out for one's self is not greed; tempered by civility, self-interest is the foundation of a free society.
Greed is when you want things you don't deserve, when you use deception, coercion or Congress to obtain them.
Greed is not good, but self-interest is.
Remember, the fines are also an ongoing source of revenue for politicians. They don't want "change" any more than Microsoft does... they want a chance to score a few billion every now and then. Microsoft is a source of cash, and that's what drives it. Microsoft could "change" however you wanted... as long as they have money, there will be people who need to prove their power by taking some of it. Being nice is not sufficient to fend off lawsuits.
Fines and lawsuits aren't solutions, they're symptoms.
It's not programming, but recovering old-emails from Exchange backups in response to a subpoena is a torture worthy of mention.
That might work if all channels cost the same, but they don't. But if ESPN is $5, HBO is $10, and OLN is $1, you can't sell them as a package without undermining the a la carte pricing.
What you might get is a system that provides a la carte pricing, but which would only save money for people who bought one or two channels. Everybody else would be better off with a discounted package, same as you have now.
I suppose if that came to pass, it wouldn't disrupt the smaller channels so much, simply because so few would switch to the a la carte pricing. But then what's the point of the whole exercise if all we're going to do is offer options that hardly anybody wants?
Oh, that's right, it's an election year.
I was thinking more along the lines of... CNN and Fox and MSNBC would raise holy hell if they didn't get included in everybody's basic service bundle, forcing Congress to grant them an exemption in order to shut them up.
Mostly what will happen is that the small channels will go out of business, or be bought out by the bigger ones. There's a chikcen & egg problem with niche channels, because they need to sell advertising. The dual-revenue model (subscription fees + ads) only works for established stations like ESPN, or those who can piggyback on bundled packages to get distribution.
The likely scenario if a la carte were mandatory would be for major channels to acquire smaller ones, then shift some key programming over to the smaller channel in hopes of building the subscriber base. If that didn't work, they'd just shut it down and cherry-pick the programming.
A la carte sounds nice, until you realize that the menu will change once it goes into effect. If I could pick and choose amomg existing channels, it might be one thing. But that won't be the choice once reality hits home.
And for that matter, this sort of price regulation inevitably makes it illegal to offer certain discounts... they couldn't do a "buy ESPN & CNN, and get another channel for free" for example, without reducing the base price of the individual channels. Most likely, they'd have to break out a base "service cost", so out of your $40 cable bill, they'll say that $30 of it is technology overhead and $10 is programming. Or $10/$30, depending on which is more profitable. Don't worry, the FCC will play right along with whatever they request.
And expect the news and political channels to get an exemption.
Meanwhile, this is about the third time in a row that Congress has promised to lower our cable bill in an election year. How many times are we gonna fall for it?
Having decent IT management makes all the difference.
Some are little more than PHB's who listen to what management asks for, and tells the techs to do it, no matter how little sense it makes. Some think that becasue IT folks are on salary, then their time is free. They just want to shift the blame off their shoulders onto somebody else's. Typically, they're hated by both users and techs.
On the other hand, some are proactive among management, they don't let the users design the system, and they care about how much time is spent solving a problem, and they care about the quality of the solution. These managers are loved by both the customers and the techs.
My guess is that about 1 in 7 IT managers are the latter type, and they're the ones with the happy staff.
Loaded on board is the Cell Phone with Camera Correction mode
Ah, that explains it... it includes imaging software to make them look slimmer.
it's just the handle strikes me as useless.
Ironically, a lot of women say the same thing about men.
What's most astonishing is that people continue to advocate moving more of the economy under government control, and implementing "reforms" that will somehow make the process work honestly.
Like that's never been tried before.
The only way to get the money out of politics is to get the money out of government. As long as there are goodies and privileges to be given out, people will find a way to buy them.
The thing about "using" water is that... well, after you use it, it's still water. You can dump chemicals into, you can shit in it, it's still water. So it's hard to say that it's "consumed." Really it's just dirtied, and can be cleaned and turned back into clean water somehwat more easily than, say, replacing oil that was burned.
Well, it's a little bit of an oversimplification to contrast "centrally designed" software with OSS. Centralized control is bad for an economy, because an economy is made up of people with varying goals. But when there is a common goal, centralized control can be a good thing. Think military, sports teams, etc. Or designing a huge application.
But.... IP law, even though it's perceived as "pro-business," is a broadly socialist concept; the government grants arbirary privileges that a copyright owner could not enforce by themselves. In this sense, government already regulates the software market. The failures of the current scheme should not be used to justify extending government control.
The emergence of Free Software is a market response to overpriced proprietary software, to API's designed to generate consumer and developer lock-in, and to the anti-consumer license provisions that it leads to.
Free Software and proprietary between them cover the market well, and it's probably the best compromise we can come up with. In other words, don't expect commercial software to ever be as nice as you want it to be. Just make sure that Free remains Free.
I should have known better than to say that.
I'll second that emotion. When I finally got a PVR 250, CPU usage during recordings went from 100% to about 5%. (P4-1.7/256MB RAM)
Also, Happauge's MPEG2 streams drop straight onto DVD, whereas ATI's had some compatibility issues.
Considering that what it does is record the shows to an MPEG or WMV file, the answer here would be yes. Even better, it can use third-party capture/encoding cards (WinTV-PVR), so it doesn't even touch the program stream (although it can use software encoding too).
If you record in MPEG2, you can use something like TMPEG to drop it onto a DVD without re-encoding.
What's funny is that the review didn't mention the coolest feature, which is the remote scheduling through snapstream.net. It's just a regular TV listings page, and a free account comes with the software. You can click to record a show, and the PVR checks in every ten minutes or so for additions, and adds them to the schedule. It's just an outbound HTTP connection, so it works through a firewall without exposing anything.
The net result is that if I'm away from home and hear about a show I want to record, I can set it up it in seconds from any web browser on the 'net. Try that with your Tivo.
This was a fairly shaky product in early versions, but it's really developed into something useful. I'd never go back to a VCR.
No shit. I once had a webcam on a bird's nest, and it would save 10K images/day. I wanted to find the pics of the eggs hatching and babies poking their heads out (lame, I know, but the women in Marketing loved it). I had some app that would display them in sequence as fast as it could load them, and I'd just let it run and watch for movement. Even so, it took about two hours to cycle through a day's pics, and I didn't have time left over to, um, take advantage of the good will I had generated.
Look at it this way... every time SCO signs a customer to a license, they make some money.
But the silver lining is that Slashdot makes even more.
This time around the judges' frustration at being ignored was palpable. Instead of remanding the issue back for yet another turn on the FCC's merry-go-round, the court vacated the rules after 60 days pending motions to reconsider. "This deadline is appropriate," said the court, "in light of the Commission's failure, after eight years, to develop lawful unbundling rules, and its apparent unwillingness to adhere to prior judicial rulings."
Slightly off-topic, but how freakin' cool is it when you do something so fast and so efficiently that the owners of Unix think you cheated?
"Get in the Zone with AutoZone," indeed. Ya'll are studs.