So the assumption is that a child young enough to be attracted to the weasel-ferret-whatever mascot will read and understand the license agreements included with his or her software? Perhaps the BSA wants to donate to some sort of fund for early legal education?
My bet is that forcing kids to read something even close to as dry as one of these licence agreements would turn them off reading permanently. Licence agreements belong in a legal department anyway, there's just no way in hell any mortal can read and understand it without 6 years lawschool. There is a reason people actually skip reading it, and that reason is all the legalese used in it. There are just no way an ordinary person can spot and understand all the ramifications of any of those agreements. Kids would have to use all their years of school to learn law to understand any of it.
Needledicks like the BSA, RIAA and MPIAA have bogotified the law totally, using it for their own fulfilment and greed.
I was working for a computer manufacturer back in the mid '90s, and for a really shitty salary. If we made _one_ mistake during one month, we would loose NOK 2000 ($285!) from the pay. I was usually sitting with the case on my lap, leaning up against the desk at about an 45 degrees angle. I had just mounted the mainboard when I felt my lap getting wet. Wondering wtf was going on, I checked. It turned out to be blood, I'd been bleeding down the backside of the mainboard, dripping in my lap (damn cheap compo cases, they'll cut you up just looking at'em!). So I unscrewed the MB, took it to the toilet, and washed it of under the tap. wiped it mostly clean with some toiletpaper, and took it back to production. Screwed it in an turned it on. It worked. So I shipped it =)
I dropped a PSU into a compo case, and managed to break the mobo in half. Looking at the MB, turned out only one chip had loosened completely, and none was broken. Soldered all the broken wires, believe me when I say that that is a shitty job! It looked crazy, but worked.
Lost a screw down on the motherboard, and heard a pop, and saw som white smoke. The screen went blank. To get the screw out, I lifted the case and turned it over. Another pop, and more smoke. I actually forgot to turn of the power befor I turned the machine around. I blew a capacitor on the mobo, and one of the chips on my NIC. Mobo worked, the coax part of my combo NIC didn't (AUX and TP worked though).
Spillt a cup of coffee in my IBM keyboard, but continued to use until half of the keys got stuck as the coffee dried. washed it under the tap, let it dry for a couple of hours, and it worked again (still does, 8 years later).
Had a heatsink on the CPU that came loose, and fell down on the graphics card. The screen went blank, the machine rebooted, and the still blank. Probably would have gotten a POST beep error, but I had removed the PC speaker to fix a broken radio. Moved the graphics card one PCI slot down, reseated the heatsink, and turned it on. It worked.
We had a testmachine when I worked doing techsupport. That machine took some beating. It had been dropped several times. We had hotswapped just about everything several times. Any new card we would try, we hotswapped with one of the current ones. And since the carpeted floors on dry days would build up a helluvalot of static, we had zapped it unnumerable times. After some time, the both the HDDs started to show wear and tear. We just mapped around all the badsectors and continued to use it. A truly marvelous machine.
I have two russian friends who've been using this service for quite some time. It actually works, and they've got a lot of music to choose from. Of course, the beeing Norway, I get this music for free from my friends, as we're legally allowed to give away music to our friends and close cow-orkers.
I would say the future of transportation would be closely linked to the the environment.
The planet we live on can by no means support the idea of an SUV per person in this world. As we have a poplulation that grows quickly, maybe even too quickly, we have to start thinking about alternative forms of transportation.
Electric cars, and fuel cell cars are most likely, seen from todays perspective. But only if the energy comes from clean sources. Driving an electric car powered from polluting gas/coal/oil power plants would negate any positive effect of driving a none polluting car. Same with fuel cell cars, producing metanol or hydrogen costs energy, and produces CO2. Agreed, CO2 is better than the mixture of toxic gases from ordinary combustion engines, but would still add to the greenhouse effect.
If just half of what the experts project about the environment and the greenhouse effect is true, I think we're about to reach the top when it comes to luxurious transportation. The environment just can't take it. Out of pure necessity we'll have to start thinking smaller, and not bigger in terms of transportation.
Have a look at their webpage, and you'll find this section: "Please Note The Bulk Club does not promote any portion of this site via bulk email period. It is against our hosting providers terms of service to do so and we will not tolerate anyone who abuses these rules on our web site."
So what we need to do is bulk mail a promotion for their site, that way their hosting providers will throw them.
Only one teeny weeny little problem with this plan, the bulk mail part... I just can't make myself do it, it goes against every moral fibre in my body!
It would also help to get an e-mail address on a less well-known domain. Actually paying money for an e-mail account, and not going for one of the free ones is a good start. Or even better, buy your own domain, and get it hosted somewhere.
I've got my own domain, and a wide range of e-mailaddresses on that domain. That way I can kill of an address/alias that's starting to get spam. Only people I known/trust gets my "personal/secret" mailaddress. I've been using this domain since the start of 2000, and I only get spam to the address I use to sign up to webpages.
1. So you install a desktop with ads, and all your other apps with ads, and before you know it your desktop looks more like a mosaic of ads than a functional, effective desktop.
2. All your machine end up being able to do is downloading more ads..
Which I say is bullshit. Because people _learn_ from using software, no matter if it's pirated or not.
And that knowledge is worth something, to the industry as a whole. There's no getting around it.
actually I'm willing to bet that piracy actually earns the industry more than with legal trading, because that way _everybody_ has the access to the software, regardless of their income or social status. without professsionals, the industry dies.
Some of the articles I have read regarding this case tells of piracy of amongst other graphical programs running in at "$20.000" per client. Some would claim that this in itself i robbery. But lets have a look at it:
I claim that software piracy actually _helps_ the industry! Because without piracy most homeusers can't afford even one of these programs on one years salary. But it is from these homeusers that the professional industry recruite their workers. Nobody can become a professional without access to the software, which the industry denies the users by pricing the software out of a homeusers league.
Further I'd like to argue that a percentage of these users are, _because_ of their involment with "illegal software piracy" hired as professionals at all the topmost IT-firms in the world. Something they could never have accieved without paying _waaaay_ to much in tutoring or the likes.
Software piracy helps the software industry by making more professionals. Regardless of what the industry (BSA in particular, but they've got to survive somehow too) claim!
...Netscape hasn't lost, everyone has. The way HTTP was designed was to make all kinds of browsers be able to easily get information from all over the Internet. But the way people fight over it, it looks like a fight between a couple of browser. But what we stand to loose here is not one or two or three browsers, but a way to gather information! As it seem at the moment IE will "win" this battle (Ironic perhaps that the most common browser is IE, while amongst the servers Apache is most common). As long as IE isn't multiplatform, or securityconserns or the likes make you unable to use it, we're only seeing the top of the iceberg when it comes to problems we will see later as plug-ins only are available for IE, websites uses IE-specific tags or ActiveX.
This is not the death of Netscape, it's the death of HTTP. What's the use of W3C when there's only one browser?
--
Geir
"I Wonder why Americans are so afraid of communism when their already overrun by Microsoft..."
I'm a Cat5 kind of guy. I use Cat5 for almost everything except running current fresh from the walloutlet. If you are cabling your house I suggest you use Cat5 or 6, forinstance this high performance TP Multimedia cable.
I suggest cabling from every room to one central point, where you connect them to a patchpanel. By using a specially made split or cable in each end you can run virtually anything over it. oBTW, use a shielded cable with shielded patchpanel and shielded RJ-45. And remember that it's not shielded unless grounded in one end!
What I have used Cat5 for so far:
Audio
Video
VGA
Controlsignals for a PLC (Programmable Logical Controller)
Doorbell
Analog phones
ISDN
Antenna
RF (Didn't work too well...)
Mouse&Keyboard
All of these I've run via standard wallsockets to a patchpanel, and sometimes out to another patchpanel. By making your own split you can run a combo of signals via one 4 pair cable, forinstance EtherNet, Analog phone & ISDN.
Some unconventional uses for Cat5 (Done'em all):
Cat of 5 tails... =)
Faradaycage
Holding a carengine in place(!)
Used generic as a rope
Running 230V, 10A (Not exactly recommended...)
Belt
IR from a room to another (needs extra HW)
I actually had a customer calling today with questions regarding linuxPPC, because he _didn't_ like MacOS X! He wanted to buy S.u.S.E Linux for PPC. If he stays on Linux, only time will tell...
Actually, it's lifespan isn't over! It has another function too, namely to point any Klingons towards earth.
That's why they put the golddisk with information about earth and man on it, isn't it?
Now let's hope some sentient beings actually find it.
1 in 10 _is_ a gross understatement. All techies I know are stressed out, and many depressed too. Of all the techies I know I think the figure is more like 9 in 10. And I don't think we've seen the end of it yet! Looks more and more like the year 2020 will be as portrayed in several cyberpunk books. Gibson looks to be more of an prophet than I initially thought. But no way back now I guess, with "the new economy" and all, that's a very vicious circle.
But when I've had my share of the money, it's time to put the keyboard on the shelf and relax for soem years before I pick it up again in a purely recreational fashion... I wish...
Microsoft has already sued a swedish company called Excel for their use of the name. I am glad to report that M$ lost! (Yes, I know it's in swedish (bork bork bork))
Slashdot Mirror
Needledicks like the BSA, RIAA and MPIAA have bogotified the law totally, using it for their own fulfilment and greed.
I was working for a computer manufacturer back in the mid '90s, and for a really shitty salary. If we made _one_ mistake during one month, we would loose NOK 2000 ($285!) from the pay. I was usually sitting with the case on my lap, leaning up against the desk at about an 45 degrees angle. I had just mounted the mainboard when I felt my lap getting wet. Wondering wtf was going on, I checked. It turned out to be blood, I'd been bleeding down the backside of the mainboard, dripping in my lap (damn cheap compo cases, they'll cut you up just looking at'em!). So I unscrewed the MB, took it to the toilet, and washed it of under the tap. wiped it mostly clean with some toiletpaper, and took it back to production. Screwed it in an turned it on. It worked. So I shipped it =)
I dropped a PSU into a compo case, and managed to break the mobo in half. Looking at the MB, turned out only one chip had loosened completely, and none was broken. Soldered all the broken wires, believe me when I say that that is a shitty job! It looked crazy, but worked.
Lost a screw down on the motherboard, and heard a pop, and saw som white smoke. The screen went blank. To get the screw out, I lifted the case and turned it over. Another pop, and more smoke. I actually forgot to turn of the power befor I turned the machine around. I blew a capacitor on the mobo, and one of the chips on my NIC. Mobo worked, the coax part of my combo NIC didn't (AUX and TP worked though).
Spillt a cup of coffee in my IBM keyboard, but continued to use until half of the keys got stuck as the coffee dried. washed it under the tap, let it dry for a couple of hours, and it worked again (still does, 8 years later).
Had a heatsink on the CPU that came loose, and fell down on the graphics card. The screen went blank, the machine rebooted, and the still blank. Probably would have gotten a POST beep error, but I had removed the PC speaker to fix a broken radio. Moved the graphics card one PCI slot down, reseated the heatsink, and turned it on. It worked.
We had a testmachine when I worked doing techsupport. That machine took some beating. It had been dropped several times. We had hotswapped just about everything several times. Any new card we would try, we hotswapped with one of the current ones. And since the carpeted floors on dry days would build up a helluvalot of static, we had zapped it unnumerable times. After some time, the both the HDDs started to show wear and tear. We just mapped around all the badsectors and continued to use it. A truly marvelous machine.
I have two russian friends who've been using this service for quite some time. It actually works, and they've got a lot of music to choose from.
Of course, the beeing Norway, I get this music for free from my friends, as we're legally allowed to give away music to our friends and close cow-orkers.
RIAA, get lost!
"In Soviet Russia, the mp3's play you"
"Good news everyone, we're canceled!"
I would say the future of transportation would be closely linked to the the environment.
The planet we live on can by no means support the idea of an SUV per person in this world. As we have a poplulation that grows quickly, maybe even too quickly, we have to start thinking about alternative forms of transportation.
Electric cars, and fuel cell cars are most likely, seen from todays perspective. But only if the energy comes from clean sources. Driving an electric car powered from polluting gas/coal/oil power plants would negate any positive effect of driving a none polluting car. Same with fuel cell cars, producing metanol or hydrogen costs energy, and produces CO2. Agreed, CO2 is better than the mixture of toxic gases from ordinary combustion engines, but would still add to the greenhouse effect.
If just half of what the experts project about the environment and the greenhouse effect is true, I think we're about to reach the top when it comes to luxurious transportation. The environment just can't take it. Out of pure necessity we'll have to start thinking smaller, and not bigger in terms of transportation.
Any member of the NRA should be shot on sight!
Because with time all your problems disappear.
With things moving as fast as they to in the IT biz. most requests are forgotten by the issuer within a couple of weeks anyway.
Have a look at their webpage, and you'll find this section:
"Please Note
The Bulk Club does not promote any portion of this site via bulk email period. It is against our hosting providers terms of service to do so and we will not tolerate anyone who abuses these rules on our web site."
So what we need to do is bulk mail a promotion for their site, that way their hosting providers will throw them.
Only one teeny weeny little problem with this plan, the bulk mail part... I just can't make myself do it, it goes against every moral fibre in my body!
Ditto..
Although it's old enough that I can't find any usable drivers for it for my Windoze box.
The lack of a third mousebutton is the only minus.
It would also help to get an e-mail address on a less well-known domain. Actually paying money for an e-mail account, and not going for one of the free ones is a good start. Or even better, buy your own domain, and get it hosted somewhere.
I've got my own domain, and a wide range of e-mailaddresses on that domain. That way I can kill of an address/alias that's starting to get spam. Only people I known/trust gets my "personal/secret" mailaddress. I've been using this domain since the start of 2000, and I only get spam to the address I use to sign up to webpages.
This is the section that I didn't know I wanted, but now that it's here I know I wouldn't want to live without it. Much like heroin in other words..
1. So you install a desktop with ads, and all your other apps with ads, and before you know it your desktop looks more like a mosaic of ads than a functional, effective desktop.
2. All your machine end up being able to do is downloading more ads..
Which I say is bullshit. Because people _learn_ from using software, no matter if it's pirated or not.
And that knowledge is worth something, to the industry as a whole. There's no getting around it.
actually I'm willing to bet that piracy actually earns the industry more than with legal trading, because that way _everybody_ has the access to the software, regardless of their income or social status. without professsionals, the industry dies.
Another point:
Some of the articles I have read regarding this case tells of piracy of amongst other graphical programs running in at "$20.000" per client. Some would claim that this in itself i robbery. But lets have a look at it:
I claim that software piracy actually _helps_ the industry! Because without piracy most homeusers can't afford even one of these programs on one years salary. But it is from these homeusers that the professional industry recruite their workers. Nobody can become a professional without access to the software, which the industry denies the users by pricing the software out of a homeusers league.
Further I'd like to argue that a percentage of these users are, _because_ of their involment with "illegal software piracy" hired as professionals at all the topmost IT-firms in the world. Something they could never have accieved without paying _waaaay_ to much in tutoring or the likes.
Software piracy helps the software industry by making more professionals. Regardless of what the industry (BSA in particular, but they've got to survive somehow too) claim!
As a note, I must say I recommend our customers to _buy_ a new distro, to support the company making it, and to get support and manuals.
When you can be a partner and get all the new distributions for free! =)
But seriously, If I try a new distro, I don't buy it, I either get it for free or D/L it via FTP.
But we are both RedHat consultancy partner and SuSE value partner, and I personally run SuSE, so I always have a CDset available.
...Netscape hasn't lost, everyone has. The way HTTP was designed was to make all kinds of browsers be able to easily get information from all over the Internet. But the way people fight over it, it looks like a fight between a couple of browser. But what we stand to loose here is not one or two or three browsers, but a way to gather information! As it seem at the moment IE will "win" this battle (Ironic perhaps that the most common browser is IE, while amongst the servers Apache is most common). As long as IE isn't multiplatform, or securityconserns or the likes make you unable to use it, we're only seeing the top of the iceberg when it comes to problems we will see later as plug-ins only are available for IE, websites uses IE-specific tags or ActiveX.
This is not the death of Netscape, it's the death of HTTP. What's the use of W3C when there's only one browser?
--
Geir
"I Wonder why Americans are so afraid of communism when their already overrun by Microsoft..."
Inhouse we use POS as an acronym for Piece Of Shit. E.g. POS driver, POS NIC etc. Now go read the article again... ;)
I'm a Cat5 kind of guy. I use Cat5 for almost everything except running current fresh from the walloutlet. If you are cabling your house I suggest you use Cat5 or 6, forinstance this high performance TP Multimedia cable.
I suggest cabling from every room to one central point, where you connect them to a patchpanel. By using a specially made split or cable in each end you can run virtually anything over it. oBTW, use a shielded cable with shielded patchpanel and shielded RJ-45. And remember that it's not shielded unless grounded in one end!
What I have used Cat5 for so far:
Audio
Video
VGA
Controlsignals for a PLC (Programmable Logical Controller)
Doorbell
Analog phones
ISDN
Antenna
RF (Didn't work too well...)
Mouse&Keyboard
All of these I've run via standard wallsockets to a patchpanel, and sometimes out to another patchpanel. By making your own split you can run a combo of signals via one 4 pair cable, forinstance EtherNet, Analog phone & ISDN.
Some unconventional uses for Cat5 (Done'em all):
Cat of 5 tails... =)
Faradaycage
Holding a carengine in place(!)
Used generic as a rope
Running 230V, 10A (Not exactly recommended...)
Belt
IR from a room to another (needs extra HW)
Geir L K
Hmm... Think I've heard of a company that does shit like that for a living... They've got this product they call NT... New Technology my ass...
.sig today
Geirlk
--
Sorry, no
I actually had a customer calling today with questions regarding linuxPPC, because he _didn't_ like MacOS X! He wanted to buy S.u.S.E Linux for PPC. If he stays on Linux, only time will tell...
;)
My bet is he stays...
...is voting like choosing between hanging and frying.
In my eyes as an "impartial", foreign observers I see both the candidates as wide-assed conservatives.
To you Americans, my condolances, no matter who gets elected.
Geir L K
Actually, it's lifespan isn't over! It has another function too, namely to point any Klingons towards earth.
That's why they put the golddisk with information about earth and man on it, isn't it? Now let's hope some sentient beings actually find it.
1 in 10 _is_ a gross understatement. All techies I know are stressed out, and many depressed too. Of all the techies I know I think the figure is more like 9 in 10. And I don't think we've seen the end of it yet! Looks more and more like the year 2020 will be as portrayed in several cyberpunk books. Gibson looks to be more of an prophet than I initially thought. But no way back now I guess, with "the new economy" and all, that's a very vicious circle.
But when I've had my share of the money, it's time to put the keyboard on the shelf and relax for soem years before I pick it up again in a purely recreational fashion... I wish...
Microsoft has already sued a swedish company called Excel for their use of the name. I am glad to report that M$ lost! (Yes, I know it's in swedish (bork bork bork))