Windows has never been much more user friendly than Linux on desktop
COUGHBULLSHITCOUGH
The MS Windows interface is not perfect, but when Win95 came out it was the best you could get on an x86. Win3.1, OS/2, DOS, whatever Unices were available then... they all paled in comparison to the Windows 95 interface.
I don't see how you can give credit for an Apple OS upgrade, which was designed and marketed by Apple, to the FreeBSD team either. They deserve about as much credit for OSX as Stallman does for Linux.
Look, this is one of the most basic concepts of journalistic writing. The first time you use an acronym, you need to spell out what it stands for. If you don't, your audience will be confused.
This is 'News For Nerds', I know, but IOCCC isn't exactly an acronym that John Q. Slashdot is likely to come across more than once or twice a year. SPELL IT OUT.
The immediate response from every bot-kiddie who finds themselves unable to trade warez and pr0ns will be to launch a DOS attack on the network -- and the IRC protocol is notoriously susceptible, so even the legitimate users will find themselves unable to use the network until the furor dies down.
If I were running an IRC network, I'd disallow DCC entirely - filter out the handshake packets before they ever even get to their destination. IRC is for chatting, not for file transfer.
People would have to uuencode files and post them line-by-line into the channel to swap files on POOTnet!
I can't see why anyone would entrust potentially crucial backups to entities they have no control over. The reasons for not doing this have all been brought up in the comments already.
Off-site backup is key, yes, but the only way it works RELIABLY is if you have complete ownership of your backup data. If I had mission-critical data I needed to protect, I would RAID the disk locally, and then do incremental backups to tape (stored off-site) PLUS mirror the data via the net onto another disk (or RAID), located in another one of my company's datacenters or colo facilities.
If Berkeley didn't get so pissed when profs flunk then entire class, I know a few who would be happy to.
As Berkeley well should. If a handful of students can't master the material well enough to get a passing grade, that's the students' fault. They're either not making an effort, or don't belong in the class to begin with.
But if EVERY student in a class receives a failing grade... it's the instructors' fault. Berkeley (and every school, really) pays them to teach. If they're not capable of teaching effectively, they need to be held accountable for their failures.
Re:Unbelievably depressing?
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
Well, maybe they shouldn't have sold out to a large and crooked corporation then...
Re:Here's some REALLY immortal code
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 4, Funny
A company that has a viable business model is more likely to be legitimate than one that doesn't; most fronts set up for money-laundering operations, for example, could be considered to not have viable business models.
Thus assessing the viability of a business model is often helpful to authorities in determining whether a company's practices merit further investigation.
I guess you've never read the relevant copyright law, because this term is very clearly defined:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#fnp
A phonorecord is the physical object in which works of authorship are embodied. The word "phonorecord" includes cassette tapes, CDs, LPs, 45 r. p. m. disks, as well as other formats.
It's short for "phonographic recording". Do I have to explain the meanings of the roots "phono-" and "-graph" to you as well?
You seem to think that the word means "vinyl disc with grooves on it, played back with a needle", which just shows your ignorance of the subject. Bone up next time before you start your rant.
The vastness of the United States, in terms of both area and population, does suggest that a pure democracy would not work on a national level.
But would it work at the state level? The populations of states are (relatively) small enough that the people can take a direct and active role...
Oh, that's right, time and again when issues are put to a direct referendum, the public chooses what's in their individual best interests (low taxes) over what's best for the community at large (funding for education).
Depends on what you mean by 'run'. There are X11 servers so you can access your favorite window manager or desktop environment from within Windows, so maybe the answer is 'Yes'. If you mean 'execute *nix binaries', then the answer would be 'No', mostly.
How about the best page-layout software? Hmm, mostly need a Mac for that, huh?
No, there's a Windows version available too. (No assertions made about the relative quality of each version.)
Okay, well I'm sure Windows will work great with my Firewire-based A/D audio rack...
Not to dismiss you out of hand, but you show me a 'Joe Longneck' at CompUSA asking the salesdrone 'Can I hook up my Firewire-based A/D audio rack to this PC???' and I will eat a stick of RAM like it was Juicyfruit.
Congratulations on identifying a tiny niche of consumers for which Windows is not a reasonable desktop solution, but that doesn't do anything to refute the claim that 'for MOST people, Windows on the desktop is acceptable'.
but he pointed to the unfulfilled promise of such earlier digital-music revolutions as the musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) format.
Unfulfilled promise??? The last 20 years of dance music would not have been possible without MIDI.
If anything in music technology is due for an update, it's the MIDI standard. The protocol is still the same as it was when it was created in the early '80s -- serial communications have gotten extremely fast elsewhere, but MIDI devices are still limited to something like 20kbps over a current loop.
I'd love to see digital instrument makers develop a standard for exchanging MIDI event data over FireWire or Bluetooth or some similar modern protocol. But not audio signals. I'm hardly a purist, but the longer an instrument signal stays in the analog domain, the better.
This technology will never filter down to low-end guitars, because to do it (and to do it RIGHT) is going to be expensive, especially compared to doing it the old fashioned way.
The electronics in an electric guitar are amazingly simple. The pickups are just magnetic coils, they go through a rheostat or two for the volume and tone knobs, then to a 1/4" jack and off to the amplifier or effects rig.
To replace the phono cord with Cat-5 means you have to stick an ADC in there to convert the signal from analog to digital, then an Ethernet adaptor to convert the digital signal into packets that can go out the RJ-45 jack. And then on the other end, the amplifier or signal processor has to have the same thing to convert the packets back into an analog audio signal. And you don't want to skimp on any of this, as the degradation in audio quality will be easily apparent.
If you want to record a decent quality guitar tone, just get a SansAmp. They're cheap as far as musical electronics go and produce acceptable if not spectacular results -- they're used professionally more often than you'd imagine.
Who Owns Your Digital Media? Obviously the artists who make it.
Incorrect. That's the answer to "Who Owns Digital Content?".
The media--literally, the medium(s) on which the content resides--belong to the person who bought it. Whether this is a shiny optical disk that you buy with the content pre-installed, or a pack of magnetic platters that you connect to your computers and later move the content onto, you own the media.
Video media such as TV shows and movies would have built-in ads within them too.
Considering that video editing software costs somewhere between 'free' and 'practically free' these days, those ads aren't going to stay in there for long.
Some people already capture their favorite TV shows to MPEG, edit the commercials out, compress them, and distribute them to the world within a day of the episodes' original air date. The content owners allowing direct downloads from their site, even if it were a pay service (which it would almost certainly have to be to justify bandwidth and server expenses), would only serve to make the TV pirates' job much easier.
I don't know how process works where you work, TekReggard, but by the time most of us go live with a project, the testing period is over. If you wait until the world starts hammering on the service to see how well it can hold up, you've waited too long and shouldn't be surprised if/when it does fail.
True, no testing environment will ever duplicate real world conditions exactly, but since this project ended up going live it's safe to assume that PostgreSQL passed the tests with flying colors. While failure is still a possibility, it seems unlikely.
It seems like the UI annoyances Jamie Zawinski complains about with Mplayer are really quite trivial when you consider the immense benefits.
The thing is, they AREN'T trivial. If they were, JWZ wouldn't spend his time ranting and moaning about them.
If an application doesn't feel usable to me, it isn't usable to me. If I get frustrated every time I try to use a tool, I'm not going to use it.
"Don't like it, you can find or write something better, now shut up" is not a valid response to complaints, and the widespread embrace of attitudes like this within the Open Source community will keep OSS from every taking over on the desktop.
If I'm watching a DVD on my computer, or really any video content, chances are I want it to take up as much screen real estate as possible. Don't clutter up my view with bitmapped brushed-metal borders or 2-dimensional remote controls or miniature web browsers. At the most there should be a menu across the top, a moderate collection of iconic buttons at the bottom. Anything more than that will just distract me from the content.
The 'emulate a real world control' idiom should have died ten yers ago.
Look, rules are going to be made one way or another. I'm not being defeatist here, I'm being frank.
The technology coalition wants to make their own rules for the products they develop and build. They feel, justifiably IMO, that it's not a government's duty to interfere in industry beyond what's required to ensure a fair and competitive market. Telling the tech companies how to implement DRM certainly falls outside of that.
But in the end, if tech companies make the rules, the consumers still have the final say. If they don't like something, they don't buy it. The tech companies, who exist only to get money from consumers, will change it.
If the government mandated the technology, the tech companies wouldn't be allowed to change it. The tech industries wouldn't have a voice. The consumers would not have a voice.
Thunderweasel's first-person account of his experience trying to market a self-made album should be required reading for everyone browsing the comments on this article.
It dispels the myth that record companies are just unnecessary middlemen who do nothing for the artists except extract their pound of flesh.
Does this mean that the industry isn't broken? Depends on what 'broken' means. Does it do what it's there to do? Sometimes, perhaps even often. Could it be improved? Most definitely.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you've never heard of XRandR.
I shouldn't have to ever hear of XRandR. Or any weird-sounding component that I can't pronounce.
As a desktop user, it should Just Work. If it doesn't Just Work, then it's not ready.
Windows has never been much more user friendly than Linux on desktop
COUGHBULLSHITCOUGH
The MS Windows interface is not perfect, but when Win95 came out it was the best you could get on an x86. Win3.1, OS/2, DOS, whatever Unices were available then... they all paled in comparison to the Windows 95 interface.
I don't see how you can give credit for an Apple OS upgrade, which was designed and marketed by Apple, to the FreeBSD team either. They deserve about as much credit for OSX as Stallman does for Linux.
A two-word file in Word 2002, for example, requires 20 Kbytes.
:(
So much for my brilliant plan to port MS Word to the Atari 2600...
Here it is.
Look, this is one of the most basic concepts of journalistic writing. The first time you use an acronym, you need to spell out what it stands for. If you don't, your audience will be confused.
This is 'News For Nerds', I know, but IOCCC isn't exactly an acronym that John Q. Slashdot is likely to come across more than once or twice a year. SPELL IT OUT.
The immediate response from every bot-kiddie who finds themselves unable to trade warez and pr0ns will be to launch a DOS attack on the network -- and the IRC protocol is notoriously susceptible, so even the legitimate users will find themselves unable to use the network until the furor dies down.
If I were running an IRC network, I'd disallow DCC entirely - filter out the handshake packets before they ever even get to their destination. IRC is for chatting, not for file transfer.
People would have to uuencode files and post them line-by-line into the channel to swap files on POOTnet!
Matthew Perry voice: "Could I BE any more of a house???"
Just another way for Lexmark to sell you a printer for next to nothing, then screw you on supplies...
I can't see why anyone would entrust potentially crucial backups to entities they have no control over. The reasons for not doing this have all been brought up in the comments already.
Off-site backup is key, yes, but the only way it works RELIABLY is if you have complete ownership of your backup data. If I had mission-critical data I needed to protect, I would RAID the disk locally, and then do incremental backups to tape (stored off-site) PLUS mirror the data via the net onto another disk (or RAID), located in another one of my company's datacenters or colo facilities.
If Berkeley didn't get so pissed when profs flunk then entire class, I know a few who would be happy to.
As Berkeley well should. If a handful of students can't master the material well enough to get a passing grade, that's the students' fault. They're either not making an effort, or don't belong in the class to begin with.
But if EVERY student in a class receives a failing grade... it's the instructors' fault. Berkeley (and every school, really) pays them to teach. If they're not capable of teaching effectively, they need to be held accountable for their failures.
Well, maybe they shouldn't have sold out to a large and crooked corporation then...
Immortal? Hardly. I was able to kill it.
A company that has a viable business model is more likely to be legitimate than one that doesn't; most fronts set up for money-laundering operations, for example, could be considered to not have viable business models.
Thus assessing the viability of a business model is often helpful to authorities in determining whether a company's practices merit further investigation.
I guess you've never read the relevant copyright law, because this term is very clearly defined:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#fnp
It's short for "phonographic recording". Do I have to explain the meanings of the roots "phono-" and "-graph" to you as well?
You seem to think that the word means "vinyl disc with grooves on it, played back with a needle", which just shows your ignorance of the subject. Bone up next time before you start your rant.
The vastness of the United States, in terms of both area and population, does suggest that a pure democracy would not work on a national level.
But would it work at the state level? The populations of states are (relatively) small enough that the people can take a direct and active role...
Oh, that's right, time and again when issues are put to a direct referendum, the public chooses what's in their individual best interests (low taxes) over what's best for the community at large (funding for education).
The System Just Doesn't Work(tm).
Run my X11 software? No?
Depends on what you mean by 'run'. There are X11 servers so you can access your favorite window manager or desktop environment from within Windows, so maybe the answer is 'Yes'. If you mean 'execute *nix binaries', then the answer would be 'No', mostly.
How about the best page-layout software? Hmm, mostly need a Mac for that, huh?
No, there's a Windows version available too. (No assertions made about the relative quality of each version.)
Okay, well I'm sure Windows will work great with my Firewire-based A/D audio rack...
Not to dismiss you out of hand, but you show me a 'Joe Longneck' at CompUSA asking the salesdrone 'Can I hook up my Firewire-based A/D audio rack to this PC???' and I will eat a stick of RAM like it was Juicyfruit.
Congratulations on identifying a tiny niche of consumers for which Windows is not a reasonable desktop solution, but that doesn't do anything to refute the claim that 'for MOST people, Windows on the desktop is acceptable'.
the Stasi (the state security organisation of the former DDR)
Fortunately, when the Dance Dance Revolution came they were the first against the wall!
but he pointed to the unfulfilled promise of such earlier digital-music revolutions as the musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) format.
Unfulfilled promise??? The last 20 years of dance music would not have been possible without MIDI.
If anything in music technology is due for an update, it's the MIDI standard. The protocol is still the same as it was when it was created in the early '80s -- serial communications have gotten extremely fast elsewhere, but MIDI devices are still limited to something like 20kbps over a current loop.
I'd love to see digital instrument makers develop a standard for exchanging MIDI event data over FireWire or Bluetooth or some similar modern protocol. But not audio signals. I'm hardly a purist, but the longer an instrument signal stays in the analog domain, the better.
This technology will never filter down to low-end guitars, because to do it (and to do it RIGHT) is going to be expensive, especially compared to doing it the old fashioned way.
The electronics in an electric guitar are amazingly simple. The pickups are just magnetic coils, they go through a rheostat or two for the volume and tone knobs, then to a 1/4" jack and off to the amplifier or effects rig.
To replace the phono cord with Cat-5 means you have to stick an ADC in there to convert the signal from analog to digital, then an Ethernet adaptor to convert the digital signal into packets that can go out the RJ-45 jack. And then on the other end, the amplifier or signal processor has to have the same thing to convert the packets back into an analog audio signal. And you don't want to skimp on any of this, as the degradation in audio quality will be easily apparent.
If you want to record a decent quality guitar tone, just get a SansAmp. They're cheap as far as musical electronics go and produce acceptable if not spectacular results -- they're used professionally more often than you'd imagine.
Incorrect. That's the answer to "Who Owns Digital Content?".
The media--literally, the medium(s) on which the content resides--belong to the person who bought it. Whether this is a shiny optical disk that you buy with the content pre-installed, or a pack of magnetic platters that you connect to your computers and later move the content onto, you own the media.
Video media such as TV shows and movies would have built-in ads within them too.
Considering that video editing software costs somewhere between 'free' and 'practically free' these days, those ads aren't going to stay in there for long.
Some people already capture their favorite TV shows to MPEG, edit the commercials out, compress them, and distribute them to the world within a day of the episodes' original air date. The content owners allowing direct downloads from their site, even if it were a pay service (which it would almost certainly have to be to justify bandwidth and server expenses), would only serve to make the TV pirates' job much easier.
I don't know how process works where you work, TekReggard, but by the time most of us go live with a project, the testing period is over. If you wait until the world starts hammering on the service to see how well it can hold up, you've waited too long and shouldn't be surprised if/when it does fail.
True, no testing environment will ever duplicate real world conditions exactly, but since this project ended up going live it's safe to assume that PostgreSQL passed the tests with flying colors. While failure is still a possibility, it seems unlikely.
It seems like the UI annoyances Jamie Zawinski complains about with Mplayer are really quite trivial when you consider the immense benefits.
The thing is, they AREN'T trivial. If they were, JWZ wouldn't spend his time ranting and moaning about them.
If an application doesn't feel usable to me, it isn't usable to me. If I get frustrated every time I try to use a tool, I'm not going to use it.
"Don't like it, you can find or write something better, now shut up" is not a valid response to complaints, and the widespread embrace of attitudes like this within the Open Source community will keep OSS from every taking over on the desktop.
Don't.
Just don't.
If I'm watching a DVD on my computer, or really any video content, chances are I want it to take up as much screen real estate as possible. Don't clutter up my view with bitmapped brushed-metal borders or 2-dimensional remote controls or miniature web browsers. At the most there should be a menu across the top, a moderate collection of iconic buttons at the bottom. Anything more than that will just distract me from the content.
The 'emulate a real world control' idiom should have died ten yers ago.
Look, rules are going to be made one way or another. I'm not being defeatist here, I'm being frank.
The technology coalition wants to make their own rules for the products they develop and build. They feel, justifiably IMO, that it's not a government's duty to interfere in industry beyond what's required to ensure a fair and competitive market. Telling the tech companies how to implement DRM certainly falls outside of that.
But in the end, if tech companies make the rules, the consumers still have the final say. If they don't like something, they don't buy it. The tech companies, who exist only to get money from consumers, will change it.
If the government mandated the technology, the tech companies wouldn't be allowed to change it. The tech industries wouldn't have a voice. The consumers would not have a voice.
Thunderweasel's first-person account of his experience trying to market a self-made album should be required reading for everyone browsing the comments on this article.
It dispels the myth that record companies are just unnecessary middlemen who do nothing for the artists except extract their pound of flesh.
Does this mean that the industry isn't broken? Depends on what 'broken' means. Does it do what it's there to do? Sometimes, perhaps even often. Could it be improved? Most definitely.