Because the QuickTime player is the de facto standard on Apple systems. It would be nice if you could play DiVx (or however it's capitalized) inside of it.
Although I wasn't particularly worried about the Mac (heh), but isn't Media Player available for the Mac as well?
That sucks. I don't think I'm alone in saying that the Quicktime player really, really sucks (this subject came up before, and I was definitely not alone). It's bug-ridden, and the interface blows.
I have a feeling this is more political than practical, which I find very annoying. Yes, I know a lot of people don't like Microsoft, but there is no question that Media Player is way better. If you're going to pick a proprietary player, why not pick the one that is 1) more useful to more people, and 2) technically better.
Well, I have to admit I haven't looked at php in quite a while. In looking at it now, I have to admit that the language has improved dramatically since I last looked at it.
Maybe to put the question another way, why would you use "yet another scripting language" rather than full-blown Perl, with all the various libraries, mod_perl, and all the huge amount of support?
I looked at php briefly a while back, and it looked like it was kind of like Active Server Pages, but the language was really primitive. I then ran across Mason, which is an ASP-like project except it uses Perl as the embedded language. I've used it in a couple of projects, and it's really, really cool.
I guess my question is why would you want to use PHP with such a primitive embedded language, when you can have full-blown Perl?
Were it not for the many, many cases where they've broken the law, I might even believe them. This is an agency with a long history of violating the bill of rights which is now telling us to trust them not to abuse an invasive tool.
What long history? Paranoia is not logic. I can't even think of any high profile cases where surveillance has been abused, short of back in the 50s.
If there are abuses, then we'll fix them and move on. But your making assumptions that the FBI is currently a corrupt organization, and you have zero facts to back that up. You can't deny law enforcement tools just because there is a small, theoretical possibility of abuse.
Evil drug dealers who use PGP and anonymous accounts are going to be pretty safe.
Well, fortunately criminals are generally stupid. Why do you think wiretaps still work?
Surveillance is neither search nor seizure. Search and/or seizure happens in the open, with the knowledge of the those whose security is being (lawfully) violated.
Thank you, Mr. Supreme Court Justice. Unfortunately, you are totally wrong. How do you think Organized Crime is primarily combated? Yes, wiretaps. Court ordered wiretaps.
This is not the case with wiretapping, nor is it the case with Carnivore -- surveillance happens without the knowledge of its subject.
Yes -- so what? Where in the fourth amendment do you see that the target of an investigation has the right to be informed of searches and/or seizures? Think it through -- the police are supposed to notify a mobster that they are in the midst of searching their off-shore bank account? They're supposed to notify the mass murderer that they are searching his rented storage space for bodies?
The government's inherent authority to conduct electronic surveillance? Funny, I thought the government was only supposed to have the powers enumerated in the Constitution, and I'm fairly sure Madison&co. didn't include an "inherent authority to conduct electronic surveillance."
God, ignorance like this is irritating. Did you fall asleep in civics class, or do you just think that criminals should have carte-blanche in our society to do whatever they want? From the Bill of Rights (you know of that part of the constition, right?):
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Note the phrase "but upon probable cause". This means the government has the right perform lawful searches. That's called "inherent authority".
From Kirch's document: "Technically, Windows NT Server 4.0 is no match for any UNIX operating system, not even the non-commercial BSDs or Linux."
This is a good example of what holds back Unix in the marketplace. This is simply biased garbage.
An example? OK, there is the fact that NT4 is far more advanced than Unix when it comes to having embeddable components in the operating system. Now, you can debate the relative merits of a monolithic system versus reusable and embeddable components, but there is no question from a technology standpoint, Window's object oriented nature is far more advanced in this area.
Not to mention that I don't see anywhere in that document that discusses how much easier it is to configure an NT system than, say, Linux. (Yes, 'linuxconf' is complete piece of garbage).
When these documents are unable to give credit where credit is due, it casts doubt on ALL comparison studies. Those of you who would write these sort of documents should keep that in mind.
Are there still people who think that the Olympics have anything to do with amateur competition and brotherly rivalry among fellow humans? Raise your hands? You do? Moron.
Could someone explain to me exactly why the Olympics should only be open to amateurs? This seems totally stupid to me. To me, the olympics are about the best athletes in the world, competing. Period. Why should we not allow the best athletes to compete just because they happen to make money doing what they do?
As an aside, you do know the real reason that the Olympics were originally open only to amateurs, right? It was done to keep the poor riff-raff out of the games, and keep it reserved only for "gentleman". Only someone with enough money to train without needing a job was able to devote the time necessary.
3) There are retail boxes for WordPerfect's Office Suite, Quake 3, and several other products for Linux; brick-and-mortar software stores often have 'Linux' sections now.
Indeed. And did you notice how miserable game sales on Linux were? And you can assume most of those sales were to people who wanted to make a political statement.
4) Last I saw, Linux was about on par with MacOS for a regular user-base.
*cough* you are insane if you think the Linux desktop base is even 1/100th the Mac installed base. Again, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
5) Many people use Linux as both a Desktop *and* a server as well.
Personally, I use Linux as a development and server environment. That does *not* count as a desktop environment. All my productivity apps (which are what we're talking about) are used under Win/2000.
We are talking about people who use Linux as a primary productivity workstation. Only the truly hard core can do that, because you have to sacrifice using the best apps (which are generally available for Windows or the Mac).
6) My University is converting Sun boxes into Linux boxes; they're more powerful at a lower cost, and run the same stuff (and more!) for what we have around here; University students generally count as Desktop users.
Uh, no they don't count. Otherwise, you would count Sun workstations as 'desktop' users, and that's not generally done. Even engineering people who use Unix for CAD applications usually also have a Windows box next door to it.
I guarantee you that they are not going to recommend Linux boxes to the Art Majors for them to do their reports.
7) Let Microsoft release 'Office for Linux', and watch businesses, universities, and individuals collectively put their money where their mouths are, and make Microsoft Apps richer and Microsoft OS poorer.
It's possible that Linux may become more viable if there were more standard apps available. In fact, I've gone on record as saying that it's primarily applications that hold Linux back (and the infrastructure to support sophisticated apps, but that's another topic). I don't argue that, I only argue that the current market is incredibly puny.
timothy sez Too bad for Microsoft Linux has "absolutely no desktop market share."
From this comment, I'm to assume that Timothy thinks that this statement is untrue? (and, please, literalist fools go away. "Absolutely no" means "too little to be relevent to anything").
Well, in my book, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And to claim that Linux has any sort of desktop market share is most definitely an extraordinary claim. Note the work 'desktop' not 'server', please.
So where's the proof?
[To quote Jack Nicholson: "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!"]
I have a savings account that once had $200 in it that was idle for over 3 years. Every month it would cost me $3, until it was finally down to $88 and I had a use for it.
It is not unusual for people to have idle accounts sitting around that have small amounts of money that one doesn't care about. If I signed up for a PayPal account on a lark, I'd probably put $20 in it to start.
I would really like to know how many of those accounts are actually being used regularly. I bet it's a way smaller number than we think.
I mean, $12/person is microscopic. What do you think the average balance at a real bank is? Wells Fargo has $118B in assets. According to their web site, they have 14.4% of the market. If "the market" is the US population (200M adults), that's around 28 million give or take (I couldn't find an exact figure). That's $4,200 / customer.
It sounds like a great service -- except where do I use it? I don't give money to friends that often.
I mean, I want micropayments for online web sites. It doesn't look like this has made any penetration into that market. According to the PayPal web site, eBay is accepting PayPal, but I haven't seen it anywhere else.
Apparently there are 3.3 million customers -- that have signed up to get a free $5. The float is $40M. That's only $12/person. That doesn't sound like it's getting a lot of "real" use to me.
On another subject, I remember that there was a guy in the early digital cash space that was trying to create anonymous digital cash. He considered it important from a privacy standpoint that digital cash should be untraceable, just like regular cash. I would imagine PayPal is not that, but does anyone know what happened to that guy or what happened with his technology?
"Robot offspring" implies there is some sort of reproduction going on, and this is NOT that. [insert obligatory beatdown of the exaggerating, stupid media].
More accurately, this is a computer using a novel technique to design a machine with minimal human programming, and hooking up the computer to a manufacturing machine.
Having a computer actually design a working machine is impressive enough without screaming about a computer generating its "offspring". And I have to say, it's somewhat pathetic that Slashdot dfollows along. Can I suggest changing the headline to "Computer creates its own design for a machine" or even if you want to be whimsical, "First generation Deep Thought takes first step at creating 'the computer that is to come after me, a computer that even I am not worthy to calculate its operational parameters'. But that's a little long.:)
RM101 grumbles that he hopes that Linux will finally get some professional testing, and the security holes in his up-to-date version of Linux will finally be fixed, so his system won't be broken into again (and he still doesn't know exactly how it was done, which is what really scares him).
i dunno. your argument seems sorta silly. if you don't like the gpl, don't use it. don't like it, don't buy it. it just seems simple to me. if you don't want to release your source, don't use the gpl
The point is not what I use or don't use, or what I like or don't like. I'm pointing out in a novel way to the GPL bigots -- and the naive people that assume the GPL is automatically good -- that it's not as free as they think it is, and that the issue is more complicated than RMS would have you believe. You may not care about what license software is released under, but it matters in a lot of practical ways, as another reply to your post pointed out.
i don't get it. how is the GPL limiting one's freedoms? the only thing i can think of is "well, you *have* to release your source then" - so use a different license. am i missing something here?
Exactly... you have to release your source code. And it also cannot be used in incompatible licensed software. That is a restriction on your personal freedom. Of course you can use a different license, but the subject is the GPL.
RMS likes to couch the GPL debate in terms of freedom, but it's really about legislated morality. If you publish your code under the GPL, you have put restrictions on the freedom of how it used, in exchange for your belief that it is more "moral" -- in the sense that if anyone uses it, they are obligated to return their mods/improvements to the community.
The point of my sig is to point out that it is extremely similar to certain religious people wanting to make adultery illegal. While that would reduce individual freedom, you would have a net gain in morality -- just like the GPL.
I leave it to you to resolve whether they are both a good idea or not.:)
P.S. Some other guy argued that it was like murder, but it's not. Murder is a clear, physical violation of someone. Adultery is a moral violation of someone, so it's more applicable.
P.P.S. Some guy way before said something like "well, my wife and I have an agreement that I can sleep around whenever I want! What about that? Huh? Huh? No immorality there!" What that fool failed to notice is that I said "net gain in morality". The small number of people for which adultery is moral doesn't change the fact that there would be a net gain.
Yes, the length of them is detrimental to their use, but I don't think that's the primary reason.
The big reason is that they're geography based. There are very few uses to which geography is relevent to a web site. I'm not going to use it for my company; what if I move it? I'm not going to use it for a personal address; again, what if I move?
The only reasonable use I can think of to a geography-based address is, surprise!, the government for a particular city, where the geography makes sense to include in the URL. Other than that, including the geography just makes no sense.
In regards to the bidirectional satellite Internet access...
I would assume that the satellite is not "aiming" signals at each receiver, so does that mean it's like cable modems where everyone is sharing the bandwidth (at least for a particular channel)? Will everyone's dish receive the packets of everyone else on that channel? And (therefore), will it slow down the more users that are using it?
If the answer to all that is "yes", I would be curious to know how much bandwidth each satellite channel has, how many channels, and how many satellites they actually have in orbit.
As for uploads, if multiple people are sharing the same channel, can the satellite handle many signals coming in at once, or does it need some Ethernet-style collision detection? Is the signal actually digitally processed by the satellite, or is it just "bounced" through some sort of analog retransmitter?
Slashdot Mirror
Because the QuickTime player is the de facto standard on Apple systems. It would be nice if you could play DiVx (or however it's capitalized) inside of it.
Although I wasn't particularly worried about the Mac (heh), but isn't Media Player available for the Mac as well?
--
That sucks. I don't think I'm alone in saying that the Quicktime player really, really sucks (this subject came up before, and I was definitely not alone). It's bug-ridden, and the interface blows.
I have a feeling this is more political than practical, which I find very annoying. Yes, I know a lot of people don't like Microsoft, but there is no question that Media Player is way better. If you're going to pick a proprietary player, why not pick the one that is 1) more useful to more people, and 2) technically better.
--
Huh? In what way is PHP primative?
Well, I have to admit I haven't looked at php in quite a while. In looking at it now, I have to admit that the language has improved dramatically since I last looked at it.
Maybe to put the question another way, why would you use "yet another scripting language" rather than full-blown Perl, with all the various libraries, mod_perl, and all the huge amount of support?
--
I looked at php briefly a while back, and it looked like it was kind of like Active Server Pages, but the language was really primitive. I then ran across Mason, which is an ASP-like project except it uses Perl as the embedded language. I've used it in a couple of projects, and it's really, really cool.
I guess my question is why would you want to use PHP with such a primitive embedded language, when you can have full-blown Perl?
--
Were it not for the many, many cases where they've broken the law, I might even believe them. This is an agency with a long history of violating the bill of rights which is now telling us to trust them not to abuse an invasive tool.
What long history? Paranoia is not logic. I can't even think of any high profile cases where surveillance has been abused, short of back in the 50s.
If there are abuses, then we'll fix them and move on. But your making assumptions that the FBI is currently a corrupt organization, and you have zero facts to back that up. You can't deny law enforcement tools just because there is a small, theoretical possibility of abuse.
Evil drug dealers who use PGP and anonymous accounts are going to be pretty safe.
Well, fortunately criminals are generally stupid. Why do you think wiretaps still work?
--
Surveillance is neither search nor seizure. Search and/or seizure happens in the open, with the knowledge of the those whose security is being (lawfully) violated.
Thank you, Mr. Supreme Court Justice. Unfortunately, you are totally wrong. How do you think Organized Crime is primarily combated? Yes, wiretaps. Court ordered wiretaps.
This is not the case with wiretapping, nor is it the case with Carnivore -- surveillance happens without the knowledge of its subject.
Yes -- so what? Where in the fourth amendment do you see that the target of an investigation has the right to be informed of searches and/or seizures? Think it through -- the police are supposed to notify a mobster that they are in the midst of searching their off-shore bank account? They're supposed to notify the mass murderer that they are searching his rented storage space for bodies?
--
The government's inherent authority to conduct electronic surveillance? Funny, I thought the government was only supposed to have the powers enumerated in the Constitution, and I'm fairly sure Madison&co. didn't include an "inherent authority to conduct electronic surveillance."
God, ignorance like this is irritating. Did you fall asleep in civics class, or do you just think that criminals should have carte-blanche in our society to do whatever they want? From the Bill of Rights (you know of that part of the constition, right?):
Note the phrase "but upon probable cause". This means the government has the right perform lawful searches. That's called "inherent authority".
--
From Kirch's document: "Technically, Windows NT Server 4.0 is no match for any UNIX operating system, not even the non-commercial BSDs or Linux."
This is a good example of what holds back Unix in the marketplace. This is simply biased garbage.
An example? OK, there is the fact that NT4 is far more advanced than Unix when it comes to having embeddable components in the operating system. Now, you can debate the relative merits of a monolithic system versus reusable and embeddable components, but there is no question from a technology standpoint, Window's object oriented nature is far more advanced in this area.
Not to mention that I don't see anywhere in that document that discusses how much easier it is to configure an NT system than, say, Linux. (Yes, 'linuxconf' is complete piece of garbage).
When these documents are unable to give credit where credit is due, it casts doubt on ALL comparison studies. Those of you who would write these sort of documents should keep that in mind.
--
Are there still people who think that the Olympics have anything to do with amateur competition and brotherly rivalry among fellow humans? Raise your hands? You do? Moron.
Could someone explain to me exactly why the Olympics should only be open to amateurs? This seems totally stupid to me. To me, the olympics are about the best athletes in the world, competing. Period. Why should we not allow the best athletes to compete just because they happen to make money doing what they do?
As an aside, you do know the real reason that the Olympics were originally open only to amateurs, right? It was done to keep the poor riff-raff out of the games, and keep it reserved only for "gentleman". Only someone with enough money to train without needing a job was able to devote the time necessary.
--
This sounds like a good way to publicize that you are in violation of someone's patent. :)
--
Article: "Einstein Explains Theory of Relativity"
Slashdotter (knows nothing, but states the irrelevent obvious): "When is Einstein going to learn that F = MA??"
Moderator: Ooooohhhh Aaaaahhhhh Mark this as insightful!
--
Why should "absolutely no" mean anything other than "absolutely no"?
Because this is the English language, not math class.
I'll bet you're a million laughs at parties.
--
1) I use it on the Desktop.
Irrelevent to the marketshare.
2) A lot of people on Slashdot do as well.
Irrelevent to the marketshare.
3) There are retail boxes for WordPerfect's Office Suite, Quake 3, and several other products for Linux; brick-and-mortar software stores often have 'Linux' sections now.
Indeed. And did you notice how miserable game sales on Linux were? And you can assume most of those sales were to people who wanted to make a political statement.
4) Last I saw, Linux was about on par with MacOS for a regular user-base.
*cough* you are insane if you think the Linux desktop base is even 1/100th the Mac installed base. Again, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.
5) Many people use Linux as both a Desktop *and* a server as well.
Personally, I use Linux as a development and server environment. That does *not* count as a desktop environment. All my productivity apps (which are what we're talking about) are used under Win/2000.
We are talking about people who use Linux as a primary productivity workstation. Only the truly hard core can do that, because you have to sacrifice using the best apps (which are generally available for Windows or the Mac).
6) My University is converting Sun boxes into Linux boxes; they're more powerful at a lower cost, and run the same stuff (and more!) for what we have around here; University students generally count as Desktop users.
Uh, no they don't count. Otherwise, you would count Sun workstations as 'desktop' users, and that's not generally done. Even engineering people who use Unix for CAD applications usually also have a Windows box next door to it.
I guarantee you that they are not going to recommend Linux boxes to the Art Majors for them to do their reports.
7) Let Microsoft release 'Office for Linux', and watch businesses, universities, and individuals collectively put their money where their mouths are, and make Microsoft Apps richer and Microsoft OS poorer.
It's possible that Linux may become more viable if there were more standard apps available. In fact, I've gone on record as saying that it's primarily applications that hold Linux back (and the infrastructure to support sophisticated apps, but that's another topic). I don't argue that, I only argue that the current market is incredibly puny.
--
timothy sez Too bad for Microsoft Linux has "absolutely no desktop market share."
From this comment, I'm to assume that Timothy thinks that this statement is untrue? (and, please, literalist fools go away. "Absolutely no" means "too little to be relevent to anything").
Well, in my book, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And to claim that Linux has any sort of desktop market share is most definitely an extraordinary claim. Note the work 'desktop' not 'server', please.
So where's the proof?
[To quote Jack Nicholson: "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!"]
--
I have a savings account that once had $200 in it that was idle for over 3 years. Every month it would cost me $3, until it was finally down to $88 and I had a use for it.
It is not unusual for people to have idle accounts sitting around that have small amounts of money that one doesn't care about. If I signed up for a PayPal account on a lark, I'd probably put $20 in it to start.
I would really like to know how many of those accounts are actually being used regularly. I bet it's a way smaller number than we think.
I mean, $12/person is microscopic. What do you think the average balance at a real bank is? Wells Fargo has $118B in assets. According to their web site, they have 14.4% of the market. If "the market" is the US population (200M adults), that's around 28 million give or take (I couldn't find an exact figure). That's $4,200 / customer.
--
It sounds like a great service -- except where do I use it? I don't give money to friends that often.
I mean, I want micropayments for online web sites. It doesn't look like this has made any penetration into that market. According to the PayPal web site, eBay is accepting PayPal, but I haven't seen it anywhere else.
Apparently there are 3.3 million customers -- that have signed up to get a free $5. The float is $40M. That's only $12/person. That doesn't sound like it's getting a lot of "real" use to me.
On another subject, I remember that there was a guy in the early digital cash space that was trying to create anonymous digital cash. He considered it important from a privacy standpoint that digital cash should be untraceable, just like regular cash. I would imagine PayPal is not that, but does anyone know what happened to that guy or what happened with his technology?
--
Maybe the guy thought Dave was floating around in a bomb, and that's why HAL wouldn't let him in...
--
"Robot offspring" implies there is some sort of reproduction going on, and this is NOT that. [insert obligatory beatdown of the exaggerating, stupid media].
More accurately, this is a computer using a novel technique to design a machine with minimal human programming, and hooking up the computer to a manufacturing machine.
Having a computer actually design a working machine is impressive enough without screaming about a computer generating its "offspring". And I have to say, it's somewhat pathetic that Slashdot dfollows along. Can I suggest changing the headline to "Computer creates its own design for a machine" or even if you want to be whimsical, "First generation Deep Thought takes first step at creating 'the computer that is to come after me, a computer that even I am not worthy to calculate its operational parameters'. But that's a little long. :)
--
RM101 should read the ipchains howto and stop writing about himself in the third person.
So what you're saying is that Linux is so insecure that I have to block services in order for it to be secure.
RM101 does not subscribe to that philosophy. RM101 wants to use the services, not turn them off.
--
Anyone remember the old Honda motor bike commercials? Children are walking through a museum of the future, and they come across a motorbike:
Curator: And here we have a motorbike -- people used to ride them for fun!
Children: Fun?? Ffffuuuunnnn...
Child (UK accent): But why would anyone want to ride a motorbike for fun?
Curator (slow, puzzled voice): We ... don't ... know...
It was pretty funny in a bizarre way.
--
RM101 grumbles that he hopes that Linux will finally get some professional testing, and the security holes in his up-to-date version of Linux will finally be fixed, so his system won't be broken into again (and he still doesn't know exactly how it was done, which is what really scares him).
--
i dunno. your argument seems sorta silly. if you don't like the gpl, don't use it. don't like it, don't buy it. it just seems simple to me. if you don't want to release your source, don't use the gpl
The point is not what I use or don't use, or what I like or don't like. I'm pointing out in a novel way to the GPL bigots -- and the naive people that assume the GPL is automatically good -- that it's not as free as they think it is, and that the issue is more complicated than RMS would have you believe. You may not care about what license software is released under, but it matters in a lot of practical ways, as another reply to your post pointed out.
--
i don't get it. how is the GPL limiting one's freedoms? the only thing i can think of is "well, you *have* to release your source then" - so use a different license. am i missing something here?
Exactly... you have to release your source code. And it also cannot be used in incompatible licensed software. That is a restriction on your personal freedom. Of course you can use a different license, but the subject is the GPL.
RMS likes to couch the GPL debate in terms of freedom, but it's really about legislated morality. If you publish your code under the GPL, you have put restrictions on the freedom of how it used, in exchange for your belief that it is more "moral" -- in the sense that if anyone uses it, they are obligated to return their mods/improvements to the community.
The point of my sig is to point out that it is extremely similar to certain religious people wanting to make adultery illegal. While that would reduce individual freedom, you would have a net gain in morality -- just like the GPL.
I leave it to you to resolve whether they are both a good idea or not. :)
P.S. Some other guy argued that it was like murder, but it's not. Murder is a clear, physical violation of someone. Adultery is a moral violation of someone, so it's more applicable.
P.P.S. Some guy way before said something like "well, my wife and I have an agreement that I can sleep around whenever I want! What about that? Huh? Huh? No immorality there!" What that fool failed to notice is that I said "net gain in morality". The small number of people for which adultery is moral doesn't change the fact that there would be a net gain.
--
Yes, the length of them is detrimental to their use, but I don't think that's the primary reason.
The big reason is that they're geography based. There are very few uses to which geography is relevent to a web site. I'm not going to use it for my company; what if I move it? I'm not going to use it for a personal address; again, what if I move?
The only reasonable use I can think of to a geography-based address is, surprise!, the government for a particular city, where the geography makes sense to include in the URL. Other than that, including the geography just makes no sense.
--
In regards to the bidirectional satellite Internet access...
I would assume that the satellite is not "aiming" signals at each receiver, so does that mean it's like cable modems where everyone is sharing the bandwidth (at least for a particular channel)? Will everyone's dish receive the packets of everyone else on that channel? And (therefore), will it slow down the more users that are using it?
If the answer to all that is "yes", I would be curious to know how much bandwidth each satellite channel has, how many channels, and how many satellites they actually have in orbit.
As for uploads, if multiple people are sharing the same channel, can the satellite handle many signals coming in at once, or does it need some Ethernet-style collision detection? Is the signal actually digitally processed by the satellite, or is it just "bounced" through some sort of analog retransmitter?
--