"We will firewall Napster at source -- we will block it at your cable company, we will block it at your phone company, we will block it at your [Internet-service provider]. We will firewall it at your PC."
"And we will bury you!"
I don't find this scary at all -- it's just a litany of 1950s solutions to 21st century problems, none of which will work. I don't have stock in Sony, so why should I care that the people in charge of the company don't have a clue?
This is emblematic of the whole Napster/DeCSS/DMCA battle that's going on now. The status quo has changed fairly radically and the institutions that profited from that status quo are begging any authority they can think of to shove the djinni back in the bottle. The authorities, who are lovers of the status quo themselves, will try to comply, but this djinni isn't going anywhere.
Sony and the like can bang their shoes on the table all the live-long day, or they can go look for other models to make money from music. If they don't, they will be replaced by others who do.
Here in Egypt, we use an Arabic-enabled version of Word 97. Problem is, if someone with the English version (that is, the rest of the world) sends you a document with a table, graphic, or other non-text element in it, Arabic Word crashes when you try to open it. That's right: Word 97 is incompatible with itself.
This is a pretty well-known problem here and as far as I know, there is no patch. I think Microsoft figures they've effectively got no competition out here, so why should they waste resources fixing even a fundamental bug for only the Arabic-speaking world?
OT, but another interesting oddity with Arabic-enabled Office 97: when the clip art library installs, it chokes when it tries to find three clip art items called Israel1 Israel2 and Israel3. They're in the installation script but not on the CD. I'm not sure if they were removed by a disgruntled technician or by Microsoft brass who decided they might offend somebody, but they must have been removed pretty hastily.
OLD: dating from the remote past; ANCIENT ("old traditions"); persisting from an earlier time ("an old ailment"), ("they brought up the same old argument"); of long standing ("an old friend")
Define "Linux" without using the phrase, "It's not Microsoft".
LINUX a free implementation of the UNIX computer operating system developed under a distributed, "open source" model
Break out of the mold and do something truly creative.
Why don't you? Isn't the whole point of open source that it empowers you to develop whatever you want? If you've got a great idea, share it with the rest of us.
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Re:Imagine a Beowulf clus... never mind
on
Techno Jacket
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· Score: 1
I sure don't want people being able to beep my skivvies to let me know that they got a Word document with a macro virus.
Even if it's one of those vibrating beepers? I think I'd be sending macro viruses to all of my coworkers...
The Agenda PDA looks pretty interesting. I was going to dump my old Cassiopeia E-10 in favor of a Handspring, but I may have to wait for this to come out now.
The manufacturer's site is not very specific about what exactly Linux VR, the OS the thing runs, is, apart from saying it's "Linux-based." What does that mean? Will simple console applications work on this thing? Does anyone know? Has anyone seen one at the Expo?
The complex system of suffixes, I think, was one of the features the professors were thinking of. As you probably know, it is actually much more complex than you describe. There are case endings, which in practice are often optional but which you have to learn, that indicate the parsing of the sentence. If a word is genetive it takes a fatha, nominative it takes a dummua, etc. So you basically have to diagram the sentence dynamically in your head as you say it (on those few occasions where you actually speak in the "classical" written dialect).
Actually, writing this I wonder if what they really meant was that Arabic could be parsed by machines more easily than other human languages. In fact, that actually makes sense now that I think about it -- it's probably true.
So as Rosanna Rosanna Danna used to say: never mind.
I've had more than one Arabic professor tell me that Arabic is the best language to program computers in because of its highly logical structure. I've never encountered any programming languages based on Arabic, so I've always assumed this was a made-up factoid that got published somewhere. Has anyone ever heard of one?
The grammatical rules of written Arabic (which is profoundly different from most spoken dialects) are pretty logical and the rules do have a rigid complexity that resembles a programming language, which is why many people in the Arab world don't learn to read and write well. It's like having to learn C in addition to your native (spoken) tongue.
Q: Why are these companies focusing on Linux as a "Windows killer"?
A: Because it is already a Windows killer. They want to ride the wave.
In the server market it's definitely competitive with Windows. On the desktop market there is a long way to go, but this effort, if done right, could go a long way to bridge that gap.
Q: And, up to this point, have any of the "Windows killer" features been GUI related?
A: No.
Q: What have they been related to?
A: Stability, performance, reliability, flexibility, scalability, cost and of course freedom.
Wouldn't it be nice to also have a GUI offering that featured stability, performance, reliability, flexibility, scalability, cost and freedom?
As this announcement conclusively demonstrates, Linux has acheived critical mass. There are going to be a lot of Slashdotters who rail against the companies and consortia who came late to the party, but that's too bad because there are going to be an awful lot of them pretty soon.
The last three years have seen the Tamagotchi and Pokemon take children in the United States by storm. Please, please, God, do whatever you have to to keep hamster simulators from catching on.
Fear not: the American people will never allow themselves to be herded like cattle at the hands of these fiends! They will rise up and smite those who try to oppress them!
Unless there was a way to use this to make shopping marginally more convenient, of course.
"Dude, you mean I can call for pizza at the push of a button and it will be delivered to me no matter where I am? Sign me up!"
As little respect I have for the financial community when it comes to making technical statements...
A number of people made digs in this vein. It's worth noting that while the magazine is for CFOs, the guy who made the statement is Peter Firstbrook, a Technology Analyst for Meta Group, which is an IT consulting firm.
programmers are secondary to users!... Userbase is king. Windows has the userbase. If Linux doesn't get a big userbase, then people won't develop there.
That's true if the developers are selling what they're developing. If they're giving it away for free... well it kind of turns that model on its head, doesn't it?
One of the conundrums with solar power is that it would be a lot less expensive if the market was large enough to enable economies of scale and encourage investments in R&D. But of course the market is not large enough for that because the technology is expensive.
It sounds like this guy is well aware of the expense issue and is doing this largely as a proof-of-concept so that others can duplicate the model and thus increase the market for the technology.
There was recently an article on CNN.com about European electricity providers being very concerned that an explosion of planned colocation facilities will strain the European grid to its limit. This is something we (or I, anyway) don't think about very much. There is a lot of talk about all the money and energy saved by the efficiencies of the "Internet economy," but all the powerful (and hot) equipment running the "Internet economy" must be using an enormous amount of power.
Does anyone know of any reliable estimates to how much power is being consumed by Internet-related hardware?
Progress on SETI is not just about being able to say, "there, look -- that's alien intelligence," but also being able to say, "we did an exhaustive search here and here and here and found no evidence of alien intelligence."
In similar news, IBM is releasing a program that will allow you to read encrypted data from DVDs. All encrypted data will be accessible, except for ones and zeroes.
My definition of backward compatibility does not include working with older versions of OTHER PEOPLE'S software.
Even if it's the operating system?! A new version of an operating system that doesn't run any of the third-party software that the last version ran is backward compatible?
Isn't this one of the things that Microsoft got dinged for in the trial -- messing around with their OS so that competitors' products would not work properly?
The fact that DOS still existed in the "all new" Win95/98 was always ridiculed by Mac/Be/Linux people who claimed it showed that Windows was still nothing more than a shell on top of 20-year-old DOS code...
But isn't it still a shell over 20 year-old DOS code, just now without access to the underpinnings of the shell?
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Re:I really don't see how they could get sued.
on
Hacker Crackdown?
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· Score: 1
If I buy gun, and go on to kill people, can MAGNUM be sued for enabling me to brake the law?
Slashdot Mirror
"And we will bury you!"
I don't find this scary at all -- it's just a litany of 1950s solutions to 21st century problems, none of which will work. I don't have stock in Sony, so why should I care that the people in charge of the company don't have a clue?
This is emblematic of the whole Napster/DeCSS/DMCA battle that's going on now. The status quo has changed fairly radically and the institutions that profited from that status quo are begging any authority they can think of to shove the djinni back in the bottle. The authorities, who are lovers of the status quo themselves, will try to comply, but this djinni isn't going anywhere.
Sony and the like can bang their shoes on the table all the live-long day, or they can go look for other models to make money from music. If they don't, they will be replaced by others who do.
This is the beauty of the free market, da?
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This explains all those African-Americans at the Republican convention!
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Here in Egypt, we use an Arabic-enabled version of Word 97. Problem is, if someone with the English version (that is, the rest of the world) sends you a document with a table, graphic, or other non-text element in it, Arabic Word crashes when you try to open it. That's right: Word 97 is incompatible with itself.
This is a pretty well-known problem here and as far as I know, there is no patch. I think Microsoft figures they've effectively got no competition out here, so why should they waste resources fixing even a fundamental bug for only the Arabic-speaking world?
OT, but another interesting oddity with Arabic-enabled Office 97: when the clip art library installs, it chokes when it tries to find three clip art items called Israel1 Israel2 and Israel3. They're in the installation script but not on the CD. I'm not sure if they were removed by a disgruntled technician or by Microsoft brass who decided they might offend somebody, but they must have been removed pretty hastily.
-
OLD: dating from the remote past; ANCIENT ("old traditions"); persisting from an earlier time ("an old ailment"), ("they brought up the same old argument"); of long standing ("an old friend")
LINUX a free implementation of the UNIX computer operating system developed under a distributed, "open source" model
Why don't you? Isn't the whole point of open source that it empowers you to develop whatever you want? If you've got a great idea, share it with the rest of us.
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Even if it's one of those vibrating beepers? I think I'd be sending macro viruses to all of my coworkers...
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The Agenda PDA looks pretty interesting. I was going to dump my old Cassiopeia E-10 in favor of a Handspring, but I may have to wait for this to come out now.
The manufacturer's site is not very specific about what exactly Linux VR, the OS the thing runs, is, apart from saying it's "Linux-based." What does that mean? Will simple console applications work on this thing? Does anyone know? Has anyone seen one at the Expo?
-
The complex system of suffixes, I think, was one of the features the professors were thinking of. As you probably know, it is actually much more complex than you describe. There are case endings, which in practice are often optional but which you have to learn, that indicate the parsing of the sentence. If a word is genetive it takes a fatha, nominative it takes a dummua, etc. So you basically have to diagram the sentence dynamically in your head as you say it (on those few occasions where you actually speak in the "classical" written dialect).
Actually, writing this I wonder if what they really meant was that Arabic could be parsed by machines more easily than other human languages. In fact, that actually makes sense now that I think about it -- it's probably true.
So as Rosanna Rosanna Danna used to say: never mind.
-
I've had more than one Arabic professor tell me that Arabic is the best language to program computers in because of its highly logical structure. I've never encountered any programming languages based on Arabic, so I've always assumed this was a made-up factoid that got published somewhere. Has anyone ever heard of one?
The grammatical rules of written Arabic (which is profoundly different from most spoken dialects) are pretty logical and the rules do have a rigid complexity that resembles a programming language, which is why many people in the Arab world don't learn to read and write well. It's like having to learn C in addition to your native (spoken) tongue.
-
In the server market it's definitely competitive with Windows. On the desktop market there is a long way to go, but this effort, if done right, could go a long way to bridge that gap.
Wouldn't it be nice to also have a GUI offering that featured stability, performance, reliability, flexibility, scalability, cost and freedom?
As this announcement conclusively demonstrates, Linux has acheived critical mass. There are going to be a lot of Slashdotters who rail against the companies and consortia who came late to the party, but that's too bad because there are going to be an awful lot of them pretty soon.
Which, by the way, is a Good Thing.
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The last three years have seen the Tamagotchi and Pokemon take children in the United States by storm. Please, please, God, do whatever you have to to keep hamster simulators from catching on.
-
Fear not: the American people will never allow themselves to be herded like cattle at the hands of these fiends! They will rise up and smite those who try to oppress them!
Unless there was a way to use this to make shopping marginally more convenient, of course.
"Dude, you mean I can call for pizza at the push of a button and it will be delivered to me no matter where I am? Sign me up!"
-
A number of people made digs in this vein. It's worth noting that while the magazine is for CFOs, the guy who made the statement is Peter Firstbrook, a Technology Analyst for Meta Group, which is an IT consulting firm.
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That's true if the developers are selling what they're developing. If they're giving it away for free... well it kind of turns that model on its head, doesn't it?
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...which would be fine, except in this case the "one small group" is not an industry association representing large multinational corporations.
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Are you kidding? That's way less than it costs to buy a Congressman! It's barely enough even to keep out the riff-raff.
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This looks to me like an extra large troll with fries on the side.
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One of the conundrums with solar power is that it would be a lot less expensive if the market was large enough to enable economies of scale and encourage investments in R&D. But of course the market is not large enough for that because the technology is expensive.
It sounds like this guy is well aware of the expense issue and is doing this largely as a proof-of-concept so that others can duplicate the model and thus increase the market for the technology.
-
There was recently an article on CNN.com about European electricity providers being very concerned that an explosion of planned colocation facilities will strain the European grid to its limit. This is something we (or I, anyway) don't think about very much. There is a lot of talk about all the money and energy saved by the efficiencies of the "Internet economy," but all the powerful (and hot) equipment running the "Internet economy" must be using an enormous amount of power.
Does anyone know of any reliable estimates to how much power is being consumed by Internet-related hardware?
-
Progress on SETI is not just about being able to say, "there, look -- that's alien intelligence," but also being able to say, "we did an exhaustive search here and here and here and found no evidence of alien intelligence."
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In a recent discussion in this space about SETI@home, one of the threads was something along the lines of:
To which an astute poster replied something like:
Uh-oh.
So do we now all have a moral obligation to dump SETI@home?
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In similar news, IBM is releasing a program that will allow you to read encrypted data from DVDs. All encrypted data will be accessible, except for ones and zeroes.
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From the ruling:
This is a bad sign: clearly Judge Patel has never actually used Napster.
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Even if it's the operating system?! A new version of an operating system that doesn't run any of the third-party software that the last version ran is backward compatible?
Isn't this one of the things that Microsoft got dinged for in the trial -- messing around with their OS so that competitors' products would not work properly?
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But isn't it still a shell over 20 year-old DOS code, just now without access to the underpinnings of the shell?
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