Forget about magnetic media...punched paper tape was the scourge of the software industry. You didn't even need a computer to copy it--just a pin and a lot of patience...har har! Bills' been on our A$$es about piracy for nearly 30 years now...talk about an innovative pioneer!
Not sure if there is much money for the "new Commodore" in the SCO-like IP enforcement business though--and aside from the C64-in-a-joystick the rest of the product line as proposed doesn't seem to really fit with Commodore's heritage. Maybe if they went back to its roots and sold nifty calculators (give TI a run for its money) or office equipment (they made good typewriters and filing cabinets I tell ya). Or maybe if they made a PC geared toward high-end multimedia use in honour of the Amiga (oops...forgot...Amiga is a totally different company again).
Commodore was started in Canada, and stayed alive because of a Canadian investor, but a "Canadian Icon"? By the time it reached prominence in the PC industry with the VIC20 and C64 it was only Canadian in a nominal sense. Also something to keep in mind is that the corporate behaviour of some of the early Commodore bigwigs would make an Enron executive blush.
Commodore was founded by Jack Tramiel, who was a Polish-born American citizen, established Commodore in Canada to circumvent stricter import/export regulations in the US (some of Commodore's early office products and parts were imported from eastern Europe and relations between US and nations within the Soviet sphere of influence were obviously cooling). Co-founder CP Morgan might've been Canadian but I'm not sure. In any case, CP Morgan's company went bankrupt and the SEC thoroughly investigated Morgan for less-than-honest conduct. Later, Canadian Irving Gould invested in Commodore and kept it alive, but he was ultimately responsible for ousting Jack in the 80s. Gould was also noted for his not-quite-honest business practises. If I recall, Commodore International was incorporated offshore to avoid taxation, although the physical offices were in Canada.
So....the "Canadian Icon" Commodore was founded by an American Citizen (a remarkable one who survived Auchwitz and had quite an acumen for business, but not Canadian) and incorporated offshore. The early Canadian investor (Morgan) had a minority stake and went bankrupt and nearly pulled Tramiel into a legal quagmire with his corporate hanky-panky. The next Canadian that stepped into the picture (Gould) outed the founder and let Jack take some of Commodore's best people with him over to Atari, then subsequently squandered the prize they snatched from Jack at Atari (the Amiga--which was a fantastic machine that was mismanaged into the ground).
Since the Bankruptcy, what was left of Commodore never came back to Canada--it existed solely in Europe.
As a Canadian myself, I think I'd find another Icon to be proud of.
..is sometimes referred to as "Never Twice the Same Colour" because the fairly complex signal is often interpreted differently in different manufacturers displays. The common characteristic is that they tend to be quite forgiving as the signal had to be demodulated out of a signal picked up by cheap rabbit ears.
It is the forgiving nature of most composite displays of that era that allowed the original Apple II to display colour at all. NTSC was designed from the start to be compatible with monochrome displays and to allow colour displays to use monochrome signals. ALL NTSC signals depicting solid, saturated colour areas (like the colour bar test pattern) would look like a series of fine vertical lines on a monochrome CRT with a fine enough dot pitch and no filtering of the chroma subcarrier.
The digital solution applied to the Apple II to composite colour display is one of the best examples of the companies heritage of ingenuity. The resulting electronics was much simpler than employing sophisticated custom, mixed-signal chips (Atari's approach) or resorting to a large, expensive-to-produce display card made of a higher number of simpler parts (S-100 and IBM compatibles--the first CGA card that provided a composite signal was a full-length card crammed with components).
Another Woz design that was elegant in its simplcity was the disk drive card. In designing the original Mac hardware, it seems Burell Smith got a lot of inspiration from the design philosophy of the Apple II--keep it simple and elegant and make it as easy as practically possible to program, because the functionality will rely heavily on software.
There is a bit of "yes and no" to the points you bring up. There are a lot of exceptions to your points and in some cases Apple has succeeded depite themselves.
Like Steve Jobs other companies Pixar and NeXT, there is a substance to Apple's products that tells a story. It goes beyond simple packaging to encompass the whole user experience.
NeXT wasn't exactly successful, despite it's original product being just as "insanely great" as some other things Jobs touched.
If a product does not meet these criteria, it is shelved like so many other projects that never rise to the top at Apple.
Apple's track record ain't perfect. The Apple III was less than spectacular, and their first attempt at a GUI-based, 16/32-bit machine (the Lisa) is pretty much universally considered a failure. Both of these products "rose to the top" for a brief time--long enough to be released.
The other interesting thing about Apple is the diversity of folks that actually work for them. They prefer to employ folks with advanced degrees, have a significant number of artists and creative folks working there...
Perhaps they do prefer to employ well-educated people, but those with advanced degreed were not responsible for all their greatest successes. There is a difference between education and intelligence/creativity/ingenuity. Woz did not have an advanced degree when he created the Apple 1 and II computers. Woz is still an engineering genious though. If you know much about electronics you should study the designs of the Apple I and II. They are elegant to the point of being works of art. It is obvious that Woz worked with what he could get and what he knew--and analogue electronics was still a mystery to him at that point. In the Apple II he had difficulty making it display an NTSC colour signal the "proper" way (modulating the phase of the chroma subcarrier) so he took great advantage of the artifacting side effect of NTSC (basically a "monochrome" display made up of fine, closely-spaced vertical lines--making the luma signal pulse digitally at frequencies near that of the chroma subcarrier...cool hack!).
And if Woz was the catalyst for the "first strike" then another "uneducated" genious brought about the second strike--Burell Smith, the chief designer of the original Mac, was pretty much self-taught in digital systems design. Smith was also very intelligent and absorbed information like a sponge. The original Mac hardware was not technically cutting edge--it made less use of custom ICs than even the 8-bit Commodore and Atari computers did--but it was also a very elegant design, and because the software and hardware designers worked together so well the end result was fantastic.
Apple (more precisely the people that comprise Apple) are driven by a common passion to create something just that much better than what is available and to create "cool" things
I wouldn't say that was always the case--Jobs could be very confrontational, and he deliberately crafted the Mac team as a "rogue element"--giving them offices in a separate building and openly stating they were the future and all those Apple II people were has-beens. The Apple II people by then were often less than passionate, though a dedicated core kept the line fresh and successful for many years after 1984.
Overall, the passion within Apple sometimes led to division, mass firings and coups. One thing that is for sure though is that within each team there is a lot of passion and a common vision.
Yeah, but how can you defend a guy that got burned by the same type of people that he caters his software for? He knew what he was getting himself into.
The guy sells mail list management software. He is nothing LIKE the people who burned him. He is no different than Brent Chapman (creator of MajorDomo) except for the fact that the latter made his product community supported, Free Software. What's next, are you gona slag Apache because is it by far the most popular HTTP server used by fraudulent websites?
This frauster "Mohammed" is the lowest form of slimeball life. He wasn't just another spammer or BitTorrent pirate:
* He not only pirated the software, he did it with the intention to resell the pirated copies for a profit. * He misrepresented himself as the creator of the software. * He had an online shopping site that accepted credit cards--given his behaviour he intended to use those card numbers fraudulently * He attempted extortion (demanding money, credit card numbers, etc for removal of the fraudulent site)
The author of the article succeeded in getting the site taken down, but if he hasn't done so yet, I believe he has an obligation to report "Mohammed's" activities to the authorities, as his behaviour is seriously illegal.
P2P apps may have perceived damages to a few large corporations, but they do not affect every single used of the internet like spam.
That is an absoulutely false and stupid statement. P2P is JUST LIKE email in terms of impact on network infrasutructure: used properly it is fine, but when abused it can cripple a network. At the height of the old Napster it slowed the sustained throughput of local cable ISP customers very noticeably. It is the chief reason for slowdowns on campus networks as well--in fact in some cases abuse of P2P apps is the chief reason for implementing bandwidth caps. I personally know of one remote site with internet connectivity provided by a sattelite uplink that racked up THOUSANDS of dollars in one months of fees because of a SINGLE KAZAA USER that shared all her music and lef thte PC on 24/7. As a result P2P was banned entirely. Incidentally, that same site had a Win2K box compromised and used to deliver spam, and it actually had LESS IMPACT on network performance than the P2P software did.
The exact location doesn't matter to me.
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What's Wrong with Unix?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
What matters to me is that there is some semblance of CONSISTENCY. That is why I hope more attention is paid to FHS and LSB. Package managers can do the housekeeping--I don't care--but Fedora and Mandrake and SuSE and many others use RPM and their packages are STILL specific to their distros (even though Mandrake started as a supposedly Red Hat compatible distro way back when). I really wish RPMs at the application level were LSB compliant so they'd play nicely.
On another note, there are reasons why apps on UNIX become installed in shared directories--it is because path management can become tedious--the PATH environment var becomes too long, or else you have to sprinkle links about your filesystem. In the GUI world this isn't really an issue, but some of us still like the command line and write scripts and typing/usr/myapp/1.0/bin/startmyapp instead of startmyapp at the prompt is annoying.
BTW, it seems you have MS Windows confused with the Mac (the only modern PC platform I know of where the "copy a folder" install method is still commonplace). Win apps most certainly do NOT install in a single directory--nearly all use the central, monolithic, non-human-readable REGISTRY to store configurations, and typically throw.dll and other files in C:\WINNT, C:\SYSTEM32 etc etc. The "install with a single xcopy command" nirvana only exists in the dreams of.NET fanboys (it might be possible technically it won't and can't happen for a couple years yet).
Re:For those that care about politics...
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Amazon Sales Record
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· Score: 1
If you care: [...]
Couldn't give a rat's a$$ really, but thanks for playing.
Wish I had some -1 (off topic) mod points to burn though...
I stopped buying console games after the N64 introduced a new wave of medocrity in gaming. With a few exceptions from Nintento direct, almost all the third-party games were crap.
You sound almost like you time-warped in from about 20 years ago, or you took a quote from the era and replaced "Atari" and "2600" or "5200" and replaced them with "Nintendo" and "N64". Anyone else remember that era?
I remember getting my Atari at the height of the craze (1982 or so?) and there were some awesome games (Yar's Revenge, Missile Command, Circus Atari, almost everything from Activision--amazes me what those wizards could do with 4k of address space and only enough RAM to hold your scores, lives and *ONE SCANLINE* of screen data). I also remember the side-effect of the craze--by Christmas 1982 it was already happening. Everyone was caching in on the craze. I clearly remember ads in Archie comics touting crappy games featuring that walking Koolaid pitcher, Bubblicious gum and Quaker Oats (WTF!? yes I'm serious).
Each and every one of these junk games was some kind of poorly executed variation on the adventure/combat/pacman/shooter themes. A couple years of that made people take a serious look at the cheap home computers that were flooding out and the bottom fell out of the console market--All the main console makers (Atari, Coleco, Mattel) even lost focus and interest and turned towards making computers or console-to-computer expanders. The thought was that if that is all games had to offer that the programmability and more "serious" apps gave PCs more educational and productivity appeal.
Consoles didn't die though--a couple years later the NES took the world by storm. Technically it was only a modest step upward from what Atari and Coleco had offered to that point (still had a CPU based on 1970s tech) but it had excellent marketing and ORIGINAL GAMES--at least for awhile (side-scrolling platforms were nearly nonexistent on home systems to that point, much less ones as well executed as Super Mario).
Things are a BIT different now, since todays console owners tend to already have PCs (so computers aren't likely to steal marketshare from consoles). The crucial thing is that we're at a peak now creatively and the economic curve is following (game sales were brisk this record-setting year). There will be a saturation point where more people will be like you and say "I'm tired of the n-teenth sequel that is the same game except for more detailed graphics". That'll probably give the industry the kick-in-the-butt it needs.
At any rate did anyone else notice a new phenomenon this year? It seems to be the start of a retro-craze: Atari has re-released the 7800 with the best of the 2600 and 7800 games built right in, and there was a big pile of "system-in-a-controller" units out there (from legitimate retro systems to 100-in-1 bootleg NES to the Spongebob Joystick with original games). It's bigger than just Jeri's "64 in a stick" toy for nostalgic geeks too--those bootleg units at the mall kiosks got a lot of attention from teens who weren't even born when the NES came out. I see that as an early indicator that the "same old new thing" is losing its appeal.
The code written by Microsoft is not free, but it's not the same code that was released under the BSD license.
Windows is closed source so how do you know for sure how much is the same and how much was altered? Unless you are an MS employee or otherwise on the insede track you don't know for sure. Yes, you can use the original BSD code, but the MS derivative is now trapped inside Windows.
What if Microsoft fixed some bugs or made improvements (ha! here's hoping though)? Those innovations are denied to those that might want to incorporate them into a *BSD operating system for example.
BSD is better than propretary for sure and it does encourage the spread of code, but the "feedback mechanism" is missing, where other "more free" open licenses provide one. There is a guarantee that GNU projects can benefit from improvements in one another. BSD allows for it, but only if the author of the derivative work maintains the BSD license or uses another open licence. This hasn't kept BSD-licensed projects from being successful (I'm a great fan of PostgreSQL as are many others for example), but one has to wonder if some innovations to these programs have been denied to the open source community (or at least delayed) by being made closed source, which would've otherwise been open if the original license was GPL.
I still won't be able to consider the GPL truly free, as it places restrictions and requirements, which is not free. The only truly free license is BSD.
"Free License" is an oxymoron. There is NO SUCH THING as a "truly free license" in all respects--by definition a license explicitly grants what rights you have or do not have.
The important aspect of "free" depends on how you define "free" and what "free" most importantly applies to. I'd plot the openness of software on a 2-axis grid. The X-axis represents the freedom of the developer, the Y axis the freedom of the code itself.
Each axis has a magnitude of freedom associated with it. At the bottom of the scale there is closed and "gratis free"...there may or may not be a monetary cost for the software, but rights are limited. Then there is "libre" free at the high end of the scale where rights are unfettered.
I contend that if you plot a point for BSD and GPL licenses on such a grid you'd find that NEITHER is completely free. GPL would be towards the top-left corner of the grid--it confers maximum freedom to the code whilst placing restrictions on the developer to protect the freedom of the *code*. Stallman, Raymond and Torvalds prefer the GPL because it encourages the free flow of information.
The BSD would be at the lower right on that grid. BSD gives complete freedom to the *developer*, but I wouldn't consider it FULLY free because it allows the coder to take derivative works and place them under different licensing (closed OR open). The "rights of the code" are granted and revoked at the whim of the developer who creates or "steals" the code. Microsoft took all freedom away from BSD-licensed code when it incorporated it into Windows NT/2K/XP/2K3. Branches of the Ingres and Postgres databases led to CA Ingres and Illustra/Informix Online Dynamic Server and in the process the code lost all its freedom.
So what is important to you is "developer freedom"--perhaps because you profit from a "commercial" derivative of open software you developed or modified, or some other reason. In that case, even BSD isn't "truly free" as you still have to put the proper attribution in your code--you'd be better to release without a license at all to the public domain.
Personally, if I am going to let everybody see and use code I worked hard to create and generously shared with others I want to make sure people don't take excessive advantage of my generosity, so I think restricting developer's freedoms in certain respects is a fair tradeoff for being able to see, modify and re-distribute my code for no monetary cost.
Beyond the political/philosophical points above, I also thing there are proactical reasons behind some people using the GPL over BSD (why the pragmatic Torvalds released the Linux kernel under GPL). I think the GPL encourages "vertical development" of open applications--that is, it discourages code forks, because those derivative works must also share code and the two variants can still "cross pollinate". Of course, one could argue that it limits the full potential of an app because you cant sell it for thousands when the recipients can copy it for free. Linux has still been quite successful though.
BSD seems to ENCOURAGE forking...in GPL, projects may "cross pollinate" but the projects keep building on their foundations, where BSD apps may fork into many instances, where in some cases the code is never shared again. Looking at Linux--it is GPL and while there are many distributions there is one foundation. With BSD there are several flavours on independent development tracks.
Given that, I think my open license of choice will be one with GPL-like restrictions to encourage CODE freedom.
If the location the videos/photos were taken was public property, can't they legally photograph anyone they please?
NO...at least not any more. Recently I went to the local rollercade and a TV show was being shot there that night (it happens on occasion). It is a public place, and the shoot was happening during regular business activity. During the shoot and for about an hour afterwards one of the production crew was cheasing down EACH AND EVERY PERSON who was not part of the cast to sign a release form. A person at the front door made sure to ask if they had signed before they left.
I asked what the big deal was, and they said something along the lines of this: We have to get legally binding consent from every single person who may appear onscreen. If they refuse to sign a release or we forget to offer them one the producers MUST electronically obscure those people or cut the footage from the show entirely (notice how that happens more often these days?).
If those people are not removed from the footage they have the legal right to sue (for monetary compensation and/or to order the footage removed from broadcast/distribution). It doesn't matter at all when or where, or who took the footage. You could willingly tape yourself and your partner having sex and send it to playboy with a note "see how naughty we are" and if they were to show it to ANYONE without getting your legal consent on a release form, you could sue their asses--even though it is clear by your actions that you are total exhibitionists and are not distressed by others seeing you.
It goes even further than that. If you are wearing clothing that has anything that could possily be copyrighted or a registered trademark, the producers must also blot out your clothing or chase down the likely coyright or trademark holder for consent. Notice lately that if there is any logo or design on a person's shirt on TV more often than not it is blurred out? That is because the copyright or trademark holder of that image has the legal right to sue if they see it on TV without their permission--and they have sued with rapidly increasing frequency. Stupid, ridiculous but true (they sell logo shirts so everyone can wear them and be seen in public--but they have a problem with it briefly flashing on TV? morons...)
Incidentally, all minors were given a release form to sign, but the parents had to also consent since minors cannot legally give consent on their own. Given the insanely litigious climate today (especially in the US where it is the new American dream it seems) it was a colossally stupid move on the game producres part to skip due-diligence and not get a release from every participant. The left themselves open to lawsuits and did not make enough effort to ensure they were not unwittingly producing child porn. they are so dumb they deserve to be sued out of existence.
HOWEVER...It was equally colossally stupid for the 17-year-old girl to go on vacation and BREAK THE LAW by drinking underage and expose herself in public. Now she bitches and moans about having to deal with the obvious and inevitable consequenses of public drunkenness and nudity. HELLO...I bet there were a dozen other digital cams out there that captured your tits and that thousands of people on Kazza, eDonkey, Gnutella, etc were mastrubating to your pics LONG before that crappy game was released.
I have some advice for her (and the hundreds of other young ladies out there that did the same thing on Calgary's Red Mile during the Stanley Cup finals)...when out in public...KEEP YOUR CLOTHES ON YOU STUPID SLUTTY BIMBOS! If you cannot seem to keep your tits in your shirts then don't complain about humiliation or trauma or the bad rep you got, because you DESERVE every bit of it. Accept it and be responsible for your consequenses. If you take resopnsibility and act maturely from that point on people will forgive you for doing something typically stupid in your youth. If you act childish and complain and sue and deflect blame
I'd say the ratio is at least 3 to 1 for people against it
I really don't know if counting/. posts is really indicative of the REAL perceptions of the GIMP. It's kind of like reading the/. web poll--how many vote early *and often* compared to the silent majority? I think "GIMP UI and colour management sucks" posts are like "in Soviet Russia" and "Beowulf cluster" posts. You have to take it with a grain of salt because they are not well-informed opinions. Not saying that the GIMP cannot use some improvement (hell yes it could), but it isn't "totally unusable" but if the UI was so resoundingly bad then why wasn't there a big push sooner to change it? Look at what happened to SodiPodi...there were enough people who wanted a program like it but were motivated enough to address its coding and operational deficincies to create the Inkscape fork. If the GIMP were so intolerable then the same thing should happen--it is open source, no excuses.
My 2 cents on the issue:
* Paint.net looks very nice but is still a lightweight for professional use--yes even compared to the GIMP. Nice to see it.NETified and much improved over MS's crappy offering (maybe it can be made to work under MONO too? here's hoping...)
* I am far from a professional graphic designer and I find GIMP quite usable. I was initially baffled when I first fired it up but after a few hours I was able to make some halfway-decent web graphics.
* I can count how many times I tried Adobe Photoshop on one hand, and I think it baffled me at least as much as the GIMP did. It is the standard-bearer in the professional graphics world and nobody calls it "unusable". Perhaps the GIMP got the way it did because the developers and biggest users are accustomed to how Photoshop worked on ther Macs, just like most people are accustomed to clicking "Start" to shut down their PCs and MDI windows in Office. I think some legal secretaries STILL think WordPerfect keyboard shortcuts are the bees knees and ought to be included in all word processors for all time. It's what you are used to.
* Of course an alternative to the GIMP would be well received--and not just by XP users. It's just that it would probably have a different audience--one without a professional background in graphic design that needs quick and simple rather than powerful but complex.
* It looks to me like a bit of a religious war here--dare I compare it to Spatial-Nautilis vs tree/browser Win/KDE?
PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed not GPL. Open nonetheless. Anyways, yes PGSQL is starting to get support from the big guys.
As for scalability, perhaps it isn't up to some of the tasks Oracle gets thrown at, but it is impressively stable and scalabe given it's FREE in all senses. It might have come late to the game with a real replication solution and features like tablespaces, but from the start it has been transactional and extensible (where Informix/IBM ODS got its "datablades" from) and even 6.x could handle a couple million recordtables on my old P120 with 48 megs of ram without breathing too hard (nothing like MS Access did with the same data...whoa!). I imagine the upcoming v8.0 is much improved and that todays computing horsepower can make it a truly enterprise-class solution.
In any case, Oracle is blindly thrown at solutions where other (often free) alternatives are still well up to the task. You don't need Oracle to run a/.-like site, although I bet a few corporate intranet CMSes are driven with Oracle. You don't need Oracle to run your ERP system unless you are a huge multinational comglomerate when SAPDB will do just fine, etc. I'd venture to say that even given Oracle's "stellar support" that in the majority of cases it is not the optimal solution.
..then we just have to suck it up and do without the movie, even if you really like it. It won't kill you. Go out and build a snowman or something. Yup, it sucks, but that is the most effective way to stop this nonsense. Draconian DRM technology adds no value to the product and is there solely to manage revenue. If it causes a loss of revenue it'll be dropped. Trying to fight a legal or political battle might seem easier, but it isn't as effective.
I read the article and feel his pain. The movie distributers are trying to pull the same crap that closed software companies tried years ago--put a bunch of legalese in fine print on the box, and force the user to agree to terms that he couldn't know until he bought the product and opened the box. I'm sure that given the circumstances it would be illegal for a store to refuse a refund (should be anyways).
The folks who brought us the interactual player are intellectual dinosaurs, and so are any distrubutors who get into bed with them. Besides that, the first and only time I installed the Interactual player it screwed up my default DVD player software and behaved like spyware (it behaved oddly when I wasn't connected to the network). As such I've decided NOT to buy ANY DVDs AT ALL until I've rented them first. If they include Interactual software I NEVER buy it.
Thankfully, I've been able to just hit "cancel" when the Interactual installer autoplays on such DVDs and manually launch the proper software. If I ever encounter a DVD that FORCES me to use their $h!tty software then I'll not only not buy it, I'll try to get a free rental from the video store.
[It's called CAN] and like I2C, its been around for ages.
You are mistaken about CAN. You either didn't read the article too closely or you have no friggin clue what CAN is. Probably the latter given your incoherent off-topic rant about Linux (WTF?).
CAN stands for Controller-Area-Network. It is not limited to use in automotive applications--it is a widely used technology for industrial automation (intelligent devices that use the open communications standard called DeviceNet). In and of itself it provides no wireless functionality, ad-hoc configuration and doesn't use the IPv6 protocol (or IPvANYTHING--it uses CIP). In automobiles, it is used by electronics systems to communicate with and control various systems. The diagnostic port on mostly European cars is handled by CAN chips.
It cannot communicate at speeds over 1 megabit per second, and it cannot communicate outside of the automobile or local control system network without extra help. OTOH unlike ethernet it is fully deterministic and has reliability mechanisms at the hardware level (that is, it guarantees data packets arrive when you want them, in the correct order).
This new thing has NOTHING AT ALL to do with CAN...it looks more like "Rendezvous for Cars" and looks very interesting indeed. Of course, with all the exciting useful things comes potential abuses (mis-applied, could Big Brother monitor and collect data about your driving behaviour? Photo radar is bad enough already).
It says BMW is involved in the project. I just hope they don't drag Microsoft and others involved in the creation of i(can't)Drive. All sorts of hilarity could ensue.
Iverall it looks like a pretty forward-thinking project, so hopefully they will make security and robustness at the forefront of considerations.
Who do you bank with troll, "1st Bank of Joe and Billy-Bob"? My bank has worked properly with Mozilla-based browsers for nearly five years now, and before that only had visual rendering issues except for a brief time after a botched redesign. Tell 'em to get with the program and fix their website so that it conforms to real standards. If they are unresponsive, vote with your dollars and your feet and trot on over to...well...almost any other bank.
Of course, you could explore other options:
* shell out extra $ for a copy of WinXP or a machine with it pre-installed
* break the law and put a cracked or pirated Windows on your machine
* stick to physically visiting your branch, ATMs and telephone banking
Dunno about you but I don't find Java all that easy across distros either.
Java apps aren't immune to dependency issues either and I'm not aware of any widespread effort on the scale of LSB to create a compatibility and deployment standard.
Dont forget the biggest dependency of all--you need a JVM to run Java. That still needs to be packeaged like any other app. Let me know when there is a GPL-compatible JVM, available in an LSB-compliant package that will install and run cross-distro...and wont break if you use a different X server or non-standard hardware...then we'll talk.
Yes, Java can be written once to run everywhere, but you often still have a few hurdles to clear during compilation and installation.
Commodore isn't exactly the big juggernaut it was 20 years ago...I'd venture to say that the owner of the brand is not exactly "well lawyered". Rather than aim to shut her down, I think they gladly paid her for the idea in hopes of finally making money off the brand for the first time in ages.
Of all the big names of the past I'd say Commodore is the safest bet on the emulation scene. The other big players 20 years ago? Apple, Atari, IBM, perhaps you could include Tandy and TI in there as well. There are still big companies behind all those brands, and in some cases they have demonstrated a willingness to defend their rights to those brands even if they no longer support those old products.
Jeri's a sharp cookie, she has gotten in on the leading edge of a craze. Those retro joysticks (a lot of them pirate NES knockoffs) are all over the malls this Christmas...it's quite possible they will be a real craze next year. Whether they'll remain popular in the long haul I'm not sure. In any case, the original NY Times article is right, Jeri has all the hallmarks of becoming another Woz or Burell or Dr. Roberts. I'd ventrue to say there'll be more neat stuff to come from here in the future.
Phones and TV were written off as gimmicks. Later some argued non-VHS/VHSc camcorders would die off becasue they used different media than the most common VCRs. There were good arguments made for those cases, but those who made bold statements without a good arumgnet ended up looking pretty foolish.
But no, I firmly believe this won't find a niche. Most people wanting blank media just want them at absolutely the lowest cost possible...
Well, I guess I'm not most people, but I'm sure many people out there do NOT want to trust important data, precious photos, etc to the abolutely lowest cost media available.
The Yamaha one wasn't much more than an interesting gimmick
IIRC the Yamaha system burnt images on the same side as the data, reducing the usable capacity of the media. If you wanted a detailed, full sized image your disc would be about as useful as an old AOL trialware CD. Is it no wonder this was a gimmick?
BTW: The latest Epsons print directly onto coated CD/DVDs with no sticky label and no stomper
What if you already have a perfectly good HP or Canon printer and you think Epson printers kinda stink? Even if they don't, I wouldn't be motivated to replace my printer or add a second one to clutter my office just so I can print right onto a CD. Presumably, this labelling technology could be incorporated into a drive costing 1/2 the price of the cheapest inject printers. Also, the disc will cost maybe 2 cents more? Probably costs more than that per CD to use ink that the Epson would need (at least for ink that won't smudge if you accidentally sneeze on it). I'm betting the injet method is slower too. I'd say the only issue to ponder would be colour--but I can count on one hand how many times I really wanted to print ANYTHING in colour, much less a CD label.
Given that I don't need ink or toner, the drives and media will be nearly the same cost as now and available from multiple vendors and the media will have the same capacity and speed as always that it stands a good chance of doing well in the market.
Nintendo's been very friendly about third party software and hardware developers/hacker
Somehow I find that hard to believe, although there is a lot of gameboy hacker stuff out there, it probably has more to do with original Gameboy being an obsolete product than with Nintendo's "generosity". Here are a few examples of "Nintendo friendliness":
Nintendo is no better than MS or Sony. If you can argue ANY console maker is hacker-friendly, it woud be Sony--they offered at least half-hearted support for running Linux and hacker/developer tools on the PS2. Has Nintndo done anything like that lately?
In any case, in the past 20 years, Nintendo has proven that it'll play hardball. If you don't have your game stamped with their Seal of Quality and pay a buttload of royalties to them they'll barely tolerate you at best, and sue your a$$ out of existence at worst.
No-one ever suggested any of this would happen. The ozone hole has stabilised and perhaps started to shrink because the world took notice of warnings from atmospheric physicists and chemists and agreed to phase out the use of CFCs. It was called the Montreal Protocol and is an excellent examlpe of worldwide action to counter an imminent threat to the whole planet.
I defy you to find any evidence that the Montreal Protocol or any other political action has directly led to the reversal of ozone layer depletion.
Furthermore, you dismiss the comment on volcanic eruptions and provide no basis in fact supporting your insulting statement:
This is just not true, and if you're so stupid as to regurgitate such outright crap it indicates you haven't bothered doing the most cursory attempt to research any, like,... 'facts'. You have humiliated yourself in public, well done.
I think you might have humiliated yourself. Volcanic eruptions DO have an IMMEDIATE, VISIBLE and GLOBAL effect on the environment. This is 100% scientific FACT. A rare but large single volcanic eruption CAN have the same effect on the environment in some ways as years of human activity. These efects were measured with the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo which caused a dramatic depletion in the ozone layer over the arctic. Scientists believe that the effects of non-CFC volcanic aerosols were magnified by CFCs, but no political accord can remove CFCs that are already there, and it'll take decades for them to break down. Horse it out, closing the barn door ain't gonna help much.
Incidentally, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo caused global COOLING at the same time due to "haze effect". It also emmitted an unusually high level of sulphur and nitrogen compounds which also cause climate disruption and acid rain. The overall effects of natural and man-made activity are really too complex to fully understand.
Here is what has been observed about volcanoes and weather:
So to say natural a phenomenon cannot dwarf the impact of human activity is total crap. At least in this case it probably slowed global warming by five years and helped climatoligists improve their models, even at the expense of the ozone layer.
The other thing to note is that the ozone hole has not been shown to affect climate in and of itself--it is more of a threat because of increased radiation exposure. I think a better reason to limit CFC emissions is the effect they have at lower altitudes (they contrubute to the greenhouse effect). To me it seems that LOW-altitude CFCs should be the biggest concern, being they are heavier than air and are probably more likely to sit on the ground for awhile before they'd ever reach the stratosphere. Their HFC replacements also contribute to the greenhouse effect but to a lesser degree.
It's sad, but I think global warming and the ozone layer are politically overhyped at the expense of some other more immediate environmental issues. Pesticide use, acid-rain causing emissions and other industrial pollutants are well known for their impacts on the environment and are largely cleaned up in the western world, but in China, Russia, other developing nations the amount of pollution is still atrocious. Oddly enough, these nations either refuse to participate in cleaning up, or are granted exceptions (Kyoto accord for example).
I'm not sure where your stats came from, but world-wide there were WAAAY more than 83 fatalities in 2000. There were even more fatalities than that in 1945 when commercial airline service was in its infancy and passenger volumes were vrey low (no jumbo jets).
The link I supplied only counts commercial, multi-engine airliner accidents. There are likely many more airplane fatalities then that--military, spacecraft and non-commercial or crew-only flights (trainers, cargo flights, bush pilots, crop dusters, leisure/personal aircraft etc). Add those in world-wide and a worldwide annual death rate over 10,000 is possible, which would make a 1:4500 probablility over 100 years a reasonable statistic.
The chance you'll die on any particular flight is still very remote--almost down to 1 in a half-million.
I still don't know how one could say the chances of a catastrophic armageddon-type event is 10 times more likely than that however, given there's never been such an event in recorded history--ice ages only occur once in several millenia for example. One can surmise about things (terrorists setting off nukes creating nuclear winter, or an asteroid scientists did not see coming) but there is no hard data to analyse (how many organisms were wiped out in the last ice age...when the dinosaurs disappeared, etc? We have no way of knowing for sure).
If you choose to buy the first release of any consumer electronic, you are playing Russian roulette
Pray tell me, if nobody buys the first release of a product, then how exactly is the manufacturer to make money to develop and produce any future versions? If nobody is first then the product dies--period.
Buying ANY new product should NOT be "Russian roulette", whether it is a spatula or a car or an electronic gaget. If it does prove to be a risky buy then the manufacturer deserves a sound throttling by consumers and the competition. If the PS3 is released in this kind of condition and it drives Sony into bankruptcy then they deserve it.
Software and electronics seem to be given way more latitude than other products, and as time goes on the gap widens. Complexity is no excuse--automobiles are very complex and getting moreso every year and their initial quality is getting better (the build quality of cars in the 80s--even Toyotas and Hondas--would be intolerable today). If the PSP was a car then these defective ones would have dents and scratches right out of the assembly line, steering wheels falling off and would have to be pushed off the lot.
When Hyundai came to North America it had horrible quality issues and barely survived on this continent--and even they didn't sell cars that refused to run right on the dealer lot and had major controls fall off the car. Hyundais' current models match Toyota and Honda in build quality, but even now their resale value suffers because of the first impressions it made 20 years ago. Sony has enjoyed a reputation of quality which is already tarnished. If there are any more high-profile problems like this then the general public will (and should) percieve Sony as a "junk" brand.
Selling a new product that works is not an insurmountable task. There is something called testing--it appears to be lacking here. Why does something like the sticky square-button get overlooked on production prototypes? Aren't there QC people who bother to turn on the machines and make sure they boot up and the screens don't have at least obvious defects? What about limited-market consumer testing--giving out or selling early units, clearly indicating that it is a product TEST? The kind of things reported about the PSP suggest that Sony decided to leave the testing to early buyers (ironically, the ones who pay the most for the product).
There is nothing made by Sony in my home at all, and reports like this make me think that there never will be.
So, can I assume that if you have a living room, or a bedroom, or a bathroom, that you'd just fill it full of stuff, right up to the walls?
Well, yeah actually--to a point. In my house I tend to put the furniture and stuff "right up to the walls". There is "empty space" but it is towards the centre of the room, in the middle of my stuff.
Space is good! It allows movement.
I see no point in allowing so much movement arount the outside of the room (or a page) when all the useful stuff is crammed in the middle.
Space is only good when appropriately used. If the article was a 20' by 20' living room the furniture would be bunched up in the middle of the room--you could not sit on the chesterfield because the console TV and bookshelf would be shoved right up against the front of it. But hey, there would be six feet of empty space from any given wall so I guess you could sit on the floor.
Overall, the article is hardly worth being posted on Slashdot--editors must've had a brain fart. I'd think the authors would try to present themselves as experts in photography (and as such would know something about presentation). There is nothing there that justifies the use of flash. It is locked to one resolution so on anything 1024 or higher it looks ridiculous. It is not printer friendly. The navigation(paging) controls are INVISIBLE until you hunt down their location with the a mouseover. The content is fairly light, and couldn've been presented in a single HTML file. Basically, wasteful use of bandwidth.
If you are annoyed by flash or want a low-bandwidth summary, here it goes:
* 2 main choices: "regular" or SLR * SLR has large sensor, "regular" is 1/9th the size * SLR==expensive, "regular"==cheap * SLR==hard to use but flexible (depth of field, exposure settings, etc) so good for "artsy" work (portraits, closeups, etc). Lots of accessories. * "normal"==easy to use but less ability to play with settings--set up to work for general purpose use (snapshots, scenery, etc) but not really well suited to specialty phototgraphy * SLRs have no LCD viewfinder screen (the ones that have an LCD screen only use it after the pic is taken). "Normal" cameras can use the LCD as a viewfinder. * conclusion: save your money and don't buy an SLR unless you are a professional or enthusiast. Take a "normal" camera along if you want to take pics quickly and easily.
There. No waiting for flash to load, no paging through tiny screens, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy are you late to the game. Bill Gates was the pioneer in the fight against piracy.
Forget about magnetic media...punched paper tape was the scourge of the software industry. You didn't even need a computer to copy it--just a pin and a lot of patience...har har! Bills' been on our A$$es about piracy for nearly 30 years now...talk about an innovative pioneer!
Not sure if there is much money for the "new Commodore" in the SCO-like IP enforcement business though--and aside from the C64-in-a-joystick the rest of the product line as proposed doesn't seem to really fit with Commodore's heritage. Maybe if they went back to its roots and sold nifty calculators (give TI a run for its money) or office equipment (they made good typewriters and filing cabinets I tell ya). Or maybe if they made a PC geared toward high-end multimedia use in honour of the Amiga (oops...forgot...Amiga is a totally different company again).
Commodore was started in Canada, and stayed alive because of a Canadian investor, but a "Canadian Icon"? By the time it reached prominence in the PC industry with the VIC20 and C64 it was only Canadian in a nominal sense. Also something to keep in mind is that the corporate behaviour of some of the early Commodore bigwigs would make an Enron executive blush.
Commodore was founded by Jack Tramiel, who was a Polish-born American citizen, established Commodore in Canada to circumvent stricter import/export regulations in the US (some of Commodore's early office products and parts were imported from eastern Europe and relations between US and nations within the Soviet sphere of influence were obviously cooling). Co-founder CP Morgan might've been Canadian but I'm not sure. In any case, CP Morgan's company went bankrupt and the SEC thoroughly investigated Morgan for less-than-honest conduct. Later, Canadian Irving Gould invested in Commodore and kept it alive, but he was ultimately responsible for ousting Jack in the 80s. Gould was also noted for his not-quite-honest business practises. If I recall, Commodore International was incorporated offshore to avoid taxation, although the physical offices were in Canada.
So....the "Canadian Icon" Commodore was founded by an American Citizen (a remarkable one who survived Auchwitz and had quite an acumen for business, but not Canadian) and incorporated offshore. The early Canadian investor (Morgan) had a minority stake and went bankrupt and nearly pulled Tramiel into a legal quagmire with his corporate hanky-panky. The next Canadian that stepped into the picture (Gould) outed the founder and let Jack take some of Commodore's best people with him over to Atari, then subsequently squandered the prize they snatched from Jack at Atari (the Amiga--which was a fantastic machine that was mismanaged into the ground).
Since the Bankruptcy, what was left of Commodore never came back to Canada--it existed solely in Europe.
As a Canadian myself, I think I'd find another Icon to be proud of.
..is sometimes referred to as "Never Twice the Same Colour" because the fairly complex signal is often interpreted differently in different manufacturers displays. The common characteristic is that they tend to be quite forgiving as the signal had to be demodulated out of a signal picked up by cheap rabbit ears.
It is the forgiving nature of most composite displays of that era that allowed the original Apple II to display colour at all. NTSC was designed from the start to be compatible with monochrome displays and to allow colour displays to use monochrome signals. ALL NTSC signals depicting solid, saturated colour areas (like the colour bar test pattern) would look like a series of fine vertical lines on a monochrome CRT with a fine enough dot pitch and no filtering of the chroma subcarrier.
The digital solution applied to the Apple II to composite colour display is one of the best examples of the companies heritage of ingenuity. The resulting electronics was much simpler than employing sophisticated custom, mixed-signal chips (Atari's approach) or resorting to a large, expensive-to-produce display card made of a higher number of simpler parts (S-100 and IBM compatibles--the first CGA card that provided a composite signal was a full-length card crammed with components).
Another Woz design that was elegant in its simplcity was the disk drive card. In designing the original Mac hardware, it seems Burell Smith got a lot of inspiration from the design philosophy of the Apple II--keep it simple and elegant and make it as easy as practically possible to program, because the functionality will rely heavily on software.
There is a bit of "yes and no" to the points you bring up. There are a lot of exceptions to your points and in some cases Apple has succeeded depite themselves.
Like Steve Jobs other companies Pixar and NeXT, there is a substance to Apple's products that tells a story. It goes beyond simple packaging to encompass the whole user experience.
NeXT wasn't exactly successful, despite it's original product being just as "insanely great" as some other things Jobs touched.
If a product does not meet these criteria, it is shelved like so many other projects that never rise to the top at Apple.
Apple's track record ain't perfect. The Apple III was less than spectacular, and their first attempt at a GUI-based, 16/32-bit machine (the Lisa) is pretty much universally considered a failure. Both of these products "rose to the top" for a brief time--long enough to be released.
The other interesting thing about Apple is the diversity of folks that actually work for them. They prefer to employ folks with advanced degrees, have a significant number of artists and creative folks working there...
Perhaps they do prefer to employ well-educated people, but those with advanced degreed were not responsible for all their greatest successes. There is a difference between education and intelligence/creativity/ingenuity. Woz did not have an advanced degree when he created the Apple 1 and II computers. Woz is still an engineering genious though. If you know much about electronics you should study the designs of the Apple I and II. They are elegant to the point of being works of art. It is obvious that Woz worked with what he could get and what he knew--and analogue electronics was still a mystery to him at that point. In the Apple II he had difficulty making it display an NTSC colour signal the "proper" way (modulating the phase of the chroma subcarrier) so he took great advantage of the artifacting side effect of NTSC (basically a "monochrome" display made up of fine, closely-spaced vertical lines--making the luma signal pulse digitally at frequencies near that of the chroma subcarrier...cool hack!).
And if Woz was the catalyst for the "first strike" then another "uneducated" genious brought about the second strike--Burell Smith, the chief designer of the original Mac, was pretty much self-taught in digital systems design. Smith was also very intelligent and absorbed information like a sponge. The original Mac hardware was not technically cutting edge--it made less use of custom ICs than even the 8-bit Commodore and Atari computers did--but it was also a very elegant design, and because the software and hardware designers worked together so well the end result was fantastic.
Apple (more precisely the people that comprise Apple) are driven by a common passion to create something just that much better than what is available and to create "cool" things
I wouldn't say that was always the case--Jobs could be very confrontational, and he deliberately crafted the Mac team as a "rogue element"--giving them offices in a separate building and openly stating they were the future and all those Apple II people were has-beens. The Apple II people by then were often less than passionate, though a dedicated core kept the line fresh and successful for many years after 1984.
Overall, the passion within Apple sometimes led to division, mass firings and coups. One thing that is for sure though is that within each team there is a lot of passion and a common vision.
...or a master flamebaiter
Yeah, but how can you defend a guy that got burned by the same type of people that he caters his software for? He knew what he was getting himself into.
The guy sells mail list management software. He is nothing LIKE the people who burned him. He is no different than Brent Chapman (creator of MajorDomo) except for the fact that the latter made his product community supported, Free Software. What's next, are you gona slag Apache because is it by far the most popular HTTP server used by fraudulent websites?
This frauster "Mohammed" is the lowest form of slimeball life. He wasn't just another spammer or BitTorrent pirate:
* He not only pirated the software, he did it with the intention to resell the pirated copies for a profit.
* He misrepresented himself as the creator of the software.
* He had an online shopping site that accepted credit cards--given his behaviour he intended to use those card numbers fraudulently
* He attempted extortion (demanding money, credit card numbers, etc for removal of the fraudulent site)
The author of the article succeeded in getting the site taken down, but if he hasn't done so yet, I believe he has an obligation to report "Mohammed's" activities to the authorities, as his behaviour is seriously illegal.
P2P apps may have perceived damages to a few large corporations, but they do not affect every single used of the internet like spam.
That is an absoulutely false and stupid statement. P2P is JUST LIKE email in terms of impact on network infrasutructure: used properly it is fine, but when abused it can cripple a network. At the height of the old Napster it slowed the sustained throughput of local cable ISP customers very noticeably. It is the chief reason for slowdowns on campus networks as well--in fact in some cases abuse of P2P apps is the chief reason for implementing bandwidth caps. I personally know of one remote site with internet connectivity provided by a sattelite uplink that racked up THOUSANDS of dollars in one months of fees because of a SINGLE KAZAA USER that shared all her music and lef thte PC on 24/7. As a result P2P was banned entirely. Incidentally, that same site had a Win2K box compromised and used to deliver spam, and it actually had LESS IMPACT on network performance than the P2P software did.
What matters to me is that there is some semblance of CONSISTENCY. That is why I hope more attention is paid to FHS and LSB. Package managers can do the housekeeping--I don't care--but Fedora and Mandrake and SuSE and many others use RPM and their packages are STILL specific to their distros (even though Mandrake started as a supposedly Red Hat compatible distro way back when). I really wish RPMs at the application level were LSB compliant so they'd play nicely.
/usr/myapp/1.0/bin/startmyapp instead of startmyapp at the prompt is annoying.
.dll and other files in C:\WINNT, C:\SYSTEM32 etc etc. The "install with a single xcopy command" nirvana only exists in the dreams of .NET fanboys (it might be possible technically it won't and can't happen for a couple years yet).
On another note, there are reasons why apps on UNIX become installed in shared directories--it is because path management can become tedious--the PATH environment var becomes too long, or else you have to sprinkle links about your filesystem. In the GUI world this isn't really an issue, but some of us still like the command line and write scripts and typing
BTW, it seems you have MS Windows confused with the Mac (the only modern PC platform I know of where the "copy a folder" install method is still commonplace). Win apps most certainly do NOT install in a single directory--nearly all use the central, monolithic, non-human-readable REGISTRY to store configurations, and typically throw
If you care: [...]
Couldn't give a rat's a$$ really, but thanks for playing.
Wish I had some -1 (off topic) mod points to burn though...
I stopped buying console games after the N64 introduced a new wave of medocrity in gaming. With a few exceptions from Nintento direct, almost all the third-party games were crap.
/combat/pacman/shooter themes. A couple years of that made people take a serious look at the cheap home computers that were flooding out and the bottom fell out of the console market--All the main console makers (Atari, Coleco, Mattel) even lost focus and interest and turned towards making computers or console-to-computer expanders. The thought was that if that is all games had to offer that the programmability and more "serious" apps gave PCs more educational and productivity appeal.
You sound almost like you time-warped in from about 20 years ago, or you took a quote from the era and replaced "Atari" and "2600" or "5200" and replaced them with "Nintendo" and "N64". Anyone else remember that era?
I remember getting my Atari at the height of the craze (1982 or so?) and there were some awesome games (Yar's Revenge, Missile Command, Circus Atari, almost everything from Activision--amazes me what those wizards could do with 4k of address space and only enough RAM to hold your scores, lives and *ONE SCANLINE* of screen data). I also remember the side-effect of the craze--by Christmas 1982 it was already happening. Everyone was caching in on the craze. I clearly remember ads in Archie comics touting crappy games featuring that walking Koolaid pitcher, Bubblicious gum and Quaker Oats (WTF!? yes I'm serious).
Each and every one of these junk games was some kind of poorly executed variation on the adventure
Consoles didn't die though--a couple years later the NES took the world by storm. Technically it was only a modest step upward from what Atari and Coleco had offered to that point (still had a CPU based on 1970s tech) but it had excellent marketing and ORIGINAL GAMES--at least for awhile (side-scrolling platforms were nearly nonexistent on home systems to that point, much less ones as well executed as Super Mario).
Things are a BIT different now, since todays console owners tend to already have PCs (so computers aren't likely to steal marketshare from consoles). The crucial thing is that we're at a peak now creatively and the economic curve is following (game sales were brisk this record-setting year). There will be a saturation point where more people will be like you and say "I'm tired of the n-teenth sequel that is the same game except for more detailed graphics". That'll probably give the industry the kick-in-the-butt it needs.
At any rate did anyone else notice a new phenomenon this year? It seems to be the start of a retro-craze: Atari has re-released the 7800 with the best of the 2600 and 7800 games built right in, and there was a big pile of "system-in-a-controller" units out there (from legitimate retro systems to 100-in-1 bootleg NES to the Spongebob Joystick with original games). It's bigger than just Jeri's "64 in a stick" toy for nostalgic geeks too--those bootleg units at the mall kiosks got a lot of attention from teens who weren't even born when the NES came out. I see that as an early indicator that the "same old new thing" is losing its appeal.
The code written by Microsoft is not free, but it's not the same code that was released under the BSD license.
Windows is closed source so how do you know for sure how much is the same and how much was altered? Unless you are an MS employee or otherwise on the insede track you don't know for sure. Yes, you can use the original BSD code, but the MS derivative is now trapped inside Windows.
What if Microsoft fixed some bugs or made improvements (ha! here's hoping though)? Those innovations are denied to those that might want to incorporate them into a *BSD operating system for example.
BSD is better than propretary for sure and it does encourage the spread of code, but the "feedback mechanism" is missing, where other "more free" open licenses provide one. There is a guarantee that GNU projects can benefit from improvements in one another. BSD allows for it, but only if the author of the derivative work maintains the BSD license or uses another open licence. This hasn't kept BSD-licensed projects from being successful (I'm a great fan of PostgreSQL as are many others for example), but one has to wonder if some innovations to these programs have been denied to the open source community (or at least delayed) by being made closed source, which would've otherwise been open if the original license was GPL.
I still won't be able to consider the GPL truly free, as it places restrictions and requirements, which is not free. The only truly free license is BSD.
"Free License" is an oxymoron. There is NO SUCH THING as a "truly free license" in all respects--by definition a license explicitly grants what rights you have or do not have.
The important aspect of "free" depends on how you define "free" and what "free" most importantly applies to. I'd plot the openness of software on a 2-axis grid. The X-axis represents the freedom of the developer, the Y axis the freedom of the code itself.
Each axis has a magnitude of freedom associated with it. At the bottom of the scale there is closed and "gratis free"...there may or may not be a monetary cost for the software, but rights are limited. Then there is "libre" free at the high end of the scale where rights are unfettered.
I contend that if you plot a point for BSD and GPL licenses on such a grid you'd find that NEITHER is completely free. GPL would be towards the top-left corner of the grid--it confers maximum freedom to the code whilst placing restrictions on the developer to protect the freedom of the *code*. Stallman, Raymond and Torvalds prefer the GPL because it encourages the free flow of information.
The BSD would be at the lower right on that grid. BSD gives complete freedom to the *developer*, but I wouldn't consider it FULLY free because it allows the coder to take derivative works and place them under different licensing (closed OR open). The "rights of the code" are granted and revoked at the whim of the developer who creates or "steals" the code. Microsoft took all freedom away from BSD-licensed code when it incorporated it into Windows NT/2K/XP/2K3. Branches of the Ingres and Postgres databases led to CA Ingres and Illustra/Informix Online Dynamic Server and in the process the code lost all its freedom.
So what is important to you is "developer freedom"--perhaps because you profit from a "commercial" derivative of open software you developed or modified, or some other reason. In that case, even BSD isn't "truly free" as you still have to put the proper attribution in your code--you'd be better to release without a license at all to the public domain.
Personally, if I am going to let everybody see and use code I worked hard to create and generously shared with others I want to make sure people don't take excessive advantage of my generosity, so I think restricting developer's freedoms in certain respects is a fair tradeoff for being able to see, modify and re-distribute my code for no monetary cost.
Beyond the political/philosophical points above, I also thing there are proactical reasons behind some people using the GPL over BSD (why the pragmatic Torvalds released the Linux kernel under GPL). I think the GPL encourages "vertical development" of open applications--that is, it discourages code forks, because those derivative works must also share code and the two variants can still "cross pollinate". Of course, one could argue that it limits the full potential of an app because you cant sell it for thousands when the recipients can copy it for free. Linux has still been quite successful though.
BSD seems to ENCOURAGE forking...in GPL, projects may "cross pollinate" but the projects keep building on their foundations, where BSD apps may fork into many instances, where in some cases the code is never shared again. Looking at Linux--it is GPL and while there are many distributions there is one foundation. With BSD there are several flavours on independent development tracks.
Given that, I think my open license of choice will be one with GPL-like restrictions to encourage CODE freedom.
If the location the videos/photos were taken was public property, can't they legally photograph anyone they please?
NO...at least not any more. Recently I went to the local rollercade and a TV show was being shot there that night (it happens on occasion). It is a public place, and the shoot was happening during regular business activity. During the shoot and for about an hour afterwards one of the production crew was cheasing down EACH AND EVERY PERSON who was not part of the cast to sign a release form. A person at the front door made sure to ask if they had signed before they left.
I asked what the big deal was, and they said something along the lines of this: We have to get legally binding consent from every single person who may appear onscreen. If they refuse to sign a release or we forget to offer them one the producers MUST electronically obscure those people or cut the footage from the show entirely (notice how that happens more often these days?).
If those people are not removed from the footage they have the legal right to sue (for monetary compensation and/or to order the footage removed from broadcast/distribution). It doesn't matter at all when or where, or who took the footage. You could willingly tape yourself and your partner having sex and send it to playboy with a note "see how naughty we are" and if they were to show it to ANYONE without getting your legal consent on a release form, you could sue their asses--even though it is clear by your actions that you are total exhibitionists and are not distressed by others seeing you.
It goes even further than that. If you are wearing clothing that has anything that could possily be copyrighted or a registered trademark, the producers must also blot out your clothing or chase down the likely coyright or trademark holder for consent. Notice lately that if there is any logo or design on a person's shirt on TV more often than not it is blurred out? That is because the copyright or trademark holder of that image has the legal right to sue if they see it on TV without their permission--and they have sued with rapidly increasing frequency. Stupid, ridiculous but true (they sell logo shirts so everyone can wear them and be seen in public--but they have a problem with it briefly flashing on TV? morons...)
Incidentally, all minors were given a release form to sign, but the parents had to also consent since minors cannot legally give consent on their own. Given the insanely litigious climate today (especially in the US where it is the new American dream it seems) it was a colossally stupid move on the game producres part to skip due-diligence and not get a release from every participant. The left themselves open to lawsuits and did not make enough effort to ensure they were not unwittingly producing child porn. they are so dumb they deserve to be sued out of existence.
HOWEVER...It was equally colossally stupid for the 17-year-old girl to go on vacation and BREAK THE LAW by drinking underage and expose herself in public. Now she bitches and moans about having to deal with the obvious and inevitable consequenses of public drunkenness and nudity. HELLO...I bet there were a dozen other digital cams out there that captured your tits and that thousands of people on Kazza, eDonkey, Gnutella, etc were mastrubating to your pics LONG before that crappy game was released.
I have some advice for her (and the hundreds of other young ladies out there that did the same thing on Calgary's Red Mile during the Stanley Cup finals)...when out in public...KEEP YOUR CLOTHES ON YOU STUPID SLUTTY BIMBOS! If you cannot seem to keep your tits in your shirts then don't complain about humiliation or trauma or the bad rep you got, because you DESERVE every bit of it. Accept it and be responsible for your consequenses. If you take resopnsibility and act maturely from that point on people will forgive you for doing something typically stupid in your youth. If you act childish and complain and sue and deflect blame
I'd say the ratio is at least 3 to 1 for people against it
/. posts is really indicative of the REAL perceptions of the GIMP. It's kind of like reading the /. web poll--how many vote early *and often* compared to the silent majority? I think "GIMP UI and colour management sucks" posts are like "in Soviet Russia" and "Beowulf cluster" posts. You have to take it with a grain of salt because they are not well-informed opinions. Not saying that the GIMP cannot use some improvement (hell yes it could), but it isn't "totally unusable" but if the UI was so resoundingly bad then why wasn't there a big push sooner to change it? Look at what happened to SodiPodi...there were enough people who wanted a program like it but were motivated enough to address its coding and operational deficincies to create the Inkscape fork. If the GIMP were so intolerable then the same thing should happen--it is open source, no excuses.
.NETified and much improved over MS's crappy offering (maybe it can be made to work under MONO too? here's hoping...)
I really don't know if counting
My 2 cents on the issue:
* Paint.net looks very nice but is still a lightweight for professional use--yes even compared to the GIMP. Nice to see it
* I am far from a professional graphic designer and I find GIMP quite usable. I was initially baffled when I first fired it up but after a few hours I was able to make some halfway-decent web graphics.
* I can count how many times I tried Adobe Photoshop on one hand, and I think it baffled me at least as much as the GIMP did. It is the standard-bearer in the professional graphics world and nobody calls it "unusable". Perhaps the GIMP got the way it did because the developers and biggest users are accustomed to how Photoshop worked on ther Macs, just like most people are accustomed to clicking "Start" to shut down their PCs and MDI windows in Office. I think some legal secretaries STILL think WordPerfect keyboard shortcuts are the bees knees and ought to be included in all word processors for all time. It's what you are used to.
* Of course an alternative to the GIMP would be well received--and not just by XP users. It's just that it would probably have a different audience--one without a professional background in graphic design that needs quick and simple rather than powerful but complex.
* It looks to me like a bit of a religious war here--dare I compare it to Spatial-Nautilis vs tree/browser Win/KDE?
and not from GPL-twisters
/.-like site, although I bet a few corporate intranet CMSes are driven with Oracle. You don't need Oracle to run your ERP system unless you are a huge multinational comglomerate when SAPDB will do just fine, etc. I'd venture to say that even given Oracle's "stellar support" that in the majority of cases it is not the optimal solution.
PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed not GPL. Open nonetheless. Anyways, yes PGSQL is starting to get support from the big guys.
As for scalability, perhaps it isn't up to some of the tasks Oracle gets thrown at, but it is impressively stable and scalabe given it's FREE in all senses. It might have come late to the game with a real replication solution and features like tablespaces, but from the start it has been transactional and extensible (where Informix/IBM ODS got its "datablades" from) and even 6.x could handle a couple million recordtables on my old P120 with 48 megs of ram without breathing too hard (nothing like MS Access did with the same data...whoa!). I imagine the upcoming v8.0 is much improved and that todays computing horsepower can make it a truly enterprise-class solution.
In any case, Oracle is blindly thrown at solutions where other (often free) alternatives are still well up to the task. You don't need Oracle to run a
..then we just have to suck it up and do without the movie, even if you really like it. It won't kill you. Go out and build a snowman or something. Yup, it sucks, but that is the most effective way to stop this nonsense. Draconian DRM technology adds no value to the product and is there solely to manage revenue. If it causes a loss of revenue it'll be dropped. Trying to fight a legal or political battle might seem easier, but it isn't as effective.
I read the article and feel his pain. The movie distributers are trying to pull the same crap that closed software companies tried years ago--put a bunch of legalese in fine print on the box, and force the user to agree to terms that he couldn't know until he bought the product and opened the box. I'm sure that given the circumstances it would be illegal for a store to refuse a refund (should be anyways).
The folks who brought us the interactual player are intellectual dinosaurs, and so are any distrubutors who get into bed with them. Besides that, the first and only time I installed the Interactual player it screwed up my default DVD player software and behaved like spyware (it behaved oddly when I wasn't connected to the network). As such I've decided NOT to buy ANY DVDs AT ALL until I've rented them first. If they include Interactual software I NEVER buy it.
Thankfully, I've been able to just hit "cancel" when the Interactual installer autoplays on such DVDs and manually launch the proper software. If I ever encounter a DVD that FORCES me to use their $h!tty software then I'll not only not buy it, I'll try to get a free rental from the video store.
[It's called CAN] and like I2C, its been around for ages.
You are mistaken about CAN. You either didn't read the article too closely or you have no friggin clue what CAN is. Probably the latter given your incoherent off-topic rant about Linux (WTF?).
CAN stands for Controller-Area-Network. It is not limited to use in automotive applications--it is a widely used technology for industrial automation (intelligent devices that use the open communications standard called DeviceNet). In and of itself it provides no wireless functionality, ad-hoc configuration and doesn't use the IPv6 protocol (or IPvANYTHING--it uses CIP). In automobiles, it is used by electronics systems to communicate with and control various systems. The diagnostic port on mostly European cars is handled by CAN chips.
It cannot communicate at speeds over 1 megabit per second, and it cannot communicate outside of the automobile or local control system network without extra help. OTOH unlike ethernet it is fully deterministic and has reliability mechanisms at the hardware level (that is, it guarantees data packets arrive when you want them, in the correct order).
This new thing has NOTHING AT ALL to do with CAN...it looks more like "Rendezvous for Cars" and looks very interesting indeed. Of course, with all the exciting useful things comes potential abuses (mis-applied, could Big Brother monitor and collect data about your driving behaviour? Photo radar is bad enough already).
It says BMW is involved in the project. I just hope they don't drag Microsoft and others involved in the creation of i(can't)Drive. All sorts of hilarity could ensue.
Iverall it looks like a pretty forward-thinking project, so hopefully they will make security and robustness at the forefront of considerations.
Who do you bank with troll, "1st Bank of Joe and Billy-Bob"? My bank has worked properly with Mozilla-based browsers for nearly five years now, and before that only had visual rendering issues except for a brief time after a botched redesign. Tell 'em to get with the program and fix their website so that it conforms to real standards. If they are unresponsive, vote with your dollars and your feet and trot on over to...well...almost any other bank.
Of course, you could explore other options:
* shell out extra $ for a copy of WinXP or a machine with it pre-installed
* break the law and put a cracked or pirated Windows on your machine
* stick to physically visiting your branch, ATMs and telephone banking
Dunno about you but I don't find Java all that easy across distros either.
Java apps aren't immune to dependency issues either and I'm not aware of any widespread effort on the scale of LSB to create a compatibility and deployment standard.
Dont forget the biggest dependency of all--you need a JVM to run Java. That still needs to be packeaged like any other app. Let me know when there is a GPL-compatible JVM, available in an LSB-compliant package that will install and run cross-distro...and wont break if you use a different X server or non-standard hardware...then we'll talk.
Yes, Java can be written once to run everywhere, but you often still have a few hurdles to clear during compilation and installation.
It appears that it's properly licensed.
Commodore isn't exactly the big juggernaut it was 20 years ago...I'd venture to say that the owner of the brand is not exactly "well lawyered". Rather than aim to shut her down, I think they gladly paid her for the idea in hopes of finally making money off the brand for the first time in ages.
Of all the big names of the past I'd say Commodore is the safest bet on the emulation scene. The other big players 20 years ago? Apple, Atari, IBM, perhaps you could include Tandy and TI in there as well. There are still big companies behind all those brands, and in some cases they have demonstrated a willingness to defend their rights to those brands even if they no longer support those old products.
Jeri's a sharp cookie, she has gotten in on the leading edge of a craze. Those retro joysticks (a lot of them pirate NES knockoffs) are all over the malls this Christmas...it's quite possible they will be a real craze next year. Whether they'll remain popular in the long haul I'm not sure. In any case, the original NY Times article is right, Jeri has all the hallmarks of becoming another Woz or Burell or Dr. Roberts. I'd ventrue to say there'll be more neat stuff to come from here in the future.
...you risk looking like a fool.
Phones and TV were written off as gimmicks. Later some argued non-VHS/VHSc camcorders would die off becasue they used different media than the most common VCRs. There were good arguments made for those cases, but those who made bold statements without a good arumgnet ended up looking pretty foolish.
But no, I firmly believe this won't find a niche. Most people wanting blank media just want them at absolutely the lowest cost possible...
Well, I guess I'm not most people, but I'm sure many people out there do NOT want to trust important data, precious photos, etc to the abolutely lowest cost media available.
The Yamaha one wasn't much more than an interesting gimmick
IIRC the Yamaha system burnt images on the same side as the data, reducing the usable capacity of the media. If you wanted a detailed, full sized image your disc would be about as useful as an old AOL trialware CD. Is it no wonder this was a gimmick?
BTW: The latest Epsons print directly onto coated CD/DVDs with no sticky label and no stomper
What if you already have a perfectly good HP or Canon printer and you think Epson printers kinda stink? Even if they don't, I wouldn't be motivated to replace my printer or add a second one to clutter my office just so I can print right onto a CD. Presumably, this labelling technology could be incorporated into a drive costing 1/2 the price of the cheapest inject printers. Also, the disc will cost maybe 2 cents more? Probably costs more than that per CD to use ink that the Epson would need (at least for ink that won't smudge if you accidentally sneeze on it). I'm betting the injet method is slower too. I'd say the only issue to ponder would be colour--but I can count on one hand how many times I really wanted to print ANYTHING in colour, much less a CD label.
Given that I don't need ink or toner, the drives and media will be nearly the same cost as now and available from multiple vendors and the media will have the same capacity and speed as always that it stands a good chance of doing well in the market.
Nintendo's been very friendly about third party software and hardware developers/hacker
Somehow I find that hard to believe, although there is a lot of gameboy hacker stuff out there, it probably has more to do with original Gameboy being an obsolete product than with Nintendo's "generosity". Here are a few examples of "Nintendo friendliness":
* Nintendo tries to stop emulation scene from moving into handheld market
* Nintendo didn't want people to play music on thier gameboys
* Yahoo sued for not doing Nintendo's (and others) job of IP rights enforcement
Nintendo is no better than MS or Sony. If you can argue ANY console maker is hacker-friendly, it woud be Sony--they offered at least half-hearted support for running Linux and hacker/developer tools on the PS2. Has Nintndo done anything like that lately?
In any case, in the past 20 years, Nintendo has proven that it'll play hardball. If you don't have your game stamped with their Seal of Quality and pay a buttload of royalties to them they'll barely tolerate you at best, and sue your a$$ out of existence at worst.
No-one ever suggested any of this would happen. The ozone hole has stabilised and perhaps started to shrink because the world took notice of warnings from atmospheric physicists and chemists and agreed to phase out the use of CFCs. It was called the Montreal Protocol and is an excellent examlpe of worldwide action to counter an imminent threat to the whole planet.
I defy you to find any evidence that the Montreal Protocol or any other political action has directly led to the reversal of ozone layer depletion.
Furthermore, you dismiss the comment on volcanic eruptions and provide no basis in fact supporting your insulting statement:
This is just not true, and if you're so stupid as to regurgitate such outright crap it indicates you haven't bothered doing the most cursory attempt to research any, like,... 'facts'. You have humiliated yourself in public, well done.
I think you might have humiliated yourself. Volcanic eruptions DO have an IMMEDIATE, VISIBLE and GLOBAL effect on the environment. This is 100% scientific FACT. A rare but large single volcanic eruption CAN have the same effect on the environment in some ways as years of human activity. These efects were measured with the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo which caused a dramatic depletion in the ozone layer over the arctic. Scientists believe that the effects of non-CFC volcanic aerosols were magnified by CFCs, but no political accord can remove CFCs that are already there, and it'll take decades for them to break down. Horse it out, closing the barn door ain't gonna help much.
Incidentally, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo caused global COOLING at the same time due to "haze effect". It also emmitted an unusually high level of sulphur and nitrogen compounds which also cause climate disruption and acid rain. The overall effects of natural and man-made activity are really too complex to fully understand.
Here is what has been observed about volcanoes and weather:
* Global temperatures after Pinatubo
* Single eruption overpowered El-nino AND human-related greenhouse effect for TWO YEARS
So to say natural a phenomenon cannot dwarf the impact of human activity is total crap. At least in this case it probably slowed global warming by five years and helped climatoligists improve their models, even at the expense of the ozone layer.
The other thing to note is that the ozone hole has not been shown to affect climate in and of itself--it is more of a threat because of increased radiation exposure. I think a better reason to limit CFC emissions is the effect they have at lower altitudes (they contrubute to the greenhouse effect). To me it seems that LOW-altitude CFCs should be the biggest concern, being they are heavier than air and are probably more likely to sit on the ground for awhile before they'd ever reach the stratosphere. Their HFC replacements also contribute to the greenhouse effect but to a lesser degree.
It's sad, but I think global warming and the ozone layer are politically overhyped at the expense of some other more immediate environmental issues. Pesticide use, acid-rain causing emissions and other industrial pollutants are well known for their impacts on the environment and are largely cleaned up in the western world, but in China, Russia, other developing nations the amount of pollution is still atrocious. Oddly enough, these nations either refuse to participate in cleaning up, or are granted exceptions (Kyoto accord for example).
...as you might think.
I'm not sure where your stats came from, but world-wide there were WAAAY more than 83 fatalities in 2000. There were even more fatalities than that in 1945 when commercial airline service was in its infancy and passenger volumes were vrey low (no jumbo jets).
The link I supplied only counts commercial, multi-engine airliner accidents. There are likely many more airplane fatalities then that--military, spacecraft and non-commercial or crew-only flights (trainers, cargo flights, bush pilots, crop dusters, leisure/personal aircraft etc). Add those in world-wide and a worldwide annual death rate over 10,000 is possible, which would make a 1:4500 probablility over 100 years a reasonable statistic.
The chance you'll die on any particular flight is still very remote--almost down to 1 in a half-million.
I still don't know how one could say the chances of a catastrophic armageddon-type event is 10 times more likely than that however, given there's never been such an event in recorded history--ice ages only occur once in several millenia for example. One can surmise about things (terrorists setting off nukes creating nuclear winter, or an asteroid scientists did not see coming) but there is no hard data to analyse (how many organisms were wiped out in the last ice age...when the dinosaurs disappeared, etc? We have no way of knowing for sure).
If you choose to buy the first release of any consumer electronic, you are playing Russian roulette
Pray tell me, if nobody buys the first release of a product, then how exactly is the manufacturer to make money to develop and produce any future versions? If nobody is first then the product dies--period.
Buying ANY new product should NOT be "Russian roulette", whether it is a spatula or a car or an electronic gaget. If it does prove to be a risky buy then the manufacturer deserves a sound throttling by consumers and the competition. If the PS3 is released in this kind of condition and it drives Sony into bankruptcy then they deserve it.
Software and electronics seem to be given way more latitude than other products, and as time goes on the gap widens. Complexity is no excuse--automobiles are very complex and getting moreso every year and their initial quality is getting better (the build quality of cars in the 80s--even Toyotas and Hondas--would be intolerable today). If the PSP was a car then these defective ones would have dents and scratches right out of the assembly line, steering wheels falling off and would have to be pushed off the lot.
When Hyundai came to North America it had horrible quality issues and barely survived on this continent--and even they didn't sell cars that refused to run right on the dealer lot and had major controls fall off the car. Hyundais' current models match Toyota and Honda in build quality, but even now their resale value suffers because of the first impressions it made 20 years ago. Sony has enjoyed a reputation of quality which is already tarnished. If there are any more high-profile problems like this then the general public will (and should) percieve Sony as a "junk" brand.
Selling a new product that works is not an insurmountable task. There is something called testing--it appears to be lacking here. Why does something like the sticky square-button get overlooked on production prototypes? Aren't there QC people who bother to turn on the machines and make sure they boot up and the screens don't have at least obvious defects? What about limited-market consumer testing--giving out or selling early units, clearly indicating that it is a product TEST? The kind of things reported about the PSP suggest that Sony decided to leave the testing to early buyers (ironically, the ones who pay the most for the product).
There is nothing made by Sony in my home at all, and reports like this make me think that there never will be.
So, can I assume that if you have a living room, or a bedroom, or a bathroom, that you'd just fill it full of stuff, right up to the walls?
Well, yeah actually--to a point. In my house I tend to put the furniture and stuff "right up to the walls". There is "empty space" but it is towards the centre of the room, in the middle of my stuff.
Space is good! It allows movement.
I see no point in allowing so much movement arount the outside of the room (or a page) when all the useful stuff is crammed in the middle.
Space is only good when appropriately used. If the article was a 20' by 20' living room the furniture would be bunched up in the middle of the room--you could not sit on the chesterfield because the console TV and bookshelf would be shoved right up against the front of it. But hey, there would be six feet of empty space from any given wall so I guess you could sit on the floor.
Overall, the article is hardly worth being posted on Slashdot--editors must've had a brain fart. I'd think the authors would try to present themselves as experts in photography (and as such would know something about presentation). There is nothing there that justifies the use of flash. It is locked to one resolution so on anything 1024 or higher it looks ridiculous. It is not printer friendly. The navigation(paging) controls are INVISIBLE until you hunt down their location with the a mouseover. The content is fairly light, and couldn've been presented in a single HTML file. Basically, wasteful use of bandwidth.
If you are annoyed by flash or want a low-bandwidth summary, here it goes:
* 2 main choices: "regular" or SLR
* SLR has large sensor, "regular" is 1/9th the size
* SLR==expensive, "regular"==cheap
* SLR==hard to use but flexible (depth of field, exposure settings, etc) so good for "artsy" work (portraits, closeups, etc). Lots of accessories.
* "normal"==easy to use but less ability to play with settings--set up to work for general purpose use (snapshots, scenery, etc) but not really well suited to specialty phototgraphy
* SLRs have no LCD viewfinder screen (the ones that have an LCD screen only use it after the pic is taken). "Normal" cameras can use the LCD as a viewfinder.
* conclusion: save your money and don't buy an SLR unless you are a professional or enthusiast. Take a "normal" camera along if you want to take pics quickly and easily.
There. No waiting for flash to load, no paging through tiny screens, etc.