I'd just love some small nickel nuclear batteries for my palm organiser. Wouldn't need to make many milliwatts to keep an organiser going. (And a half life of 100+ years!).
Probably less damaging to the environment than 100 years of batteries, too.
If you are as like me, and filter out the -1's then I'll just quite post the original troll here. Its not that I approve of trolling, but the above response was so funny it made me go check the original. So, to save you a mouseclick:
Re:Funny, (Score:-1) by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM on Thursday May 16
Stop whinning you fucking Linux hippies. How much money did you shell out to sign up for that hotmail account? $0.00 It's free as in beer. Now take that spam and shove it!
Re:Why China?
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Except 12 million chinese schoolkids, who will eventually grow up and live in what is become the word's largest economy
I think that 12 million is a bit of an underestimate. Try 100 million and you would be a bit closer to the mark. If it were only 12 million children, it wouldn't become the world's largest economy. Of course, India could still take that badge.
I have complained about this to the Opera support groups [opera.com] but they told me it wasn't possible to do a "complete" fake header. If you want that I guess you have to rewrite user-agent headers with a proxy.
One agent (on Windows) that can do this is the proxomitron:
http://www.internetmall.net/prox/
Which I highly reccomend - it can totally rewrite any incoming and outgoing HTML. So it could make IE look like mozilla (No, I can't think of a reason to do this either).
The only reason your digital (PCS, GSM) phone's batteries last longer (and stays cooler, too) is because the signal is either on or off, 1 or 0.
You might be right, but I was very much of the opinion that the phone's transmission power was much more finely controlled in a GSM network. Aside from the obvious reason to do this - If you have a GSM phone pumping out at full power all the time it will take up the time/frequency slot allocated to it in a 35 km (or more) radius. In a densely populated areas that would cause a very hard limit on the number of mobile phones that can ever be used at once.
This is (one of) the reasons for banning mobile phones in aircraft. As your 737 comes in to land, everyone rings up their loved ones to say "I'll be home soon". While you are in the air, you are transmitting over the whole city, pretty much equally, taking out every base tower in that frequency (and with GSM, time) slot.
The other reason I believe that they phones output can be regulated was I lived in a small country town for a while and was the first user of a GSM phone there. The base station was badly set up, leading to multiple dropped calls. One of the temporary fixes that the technicians did was to instruct the phones on that cell to work at full power all the time, and warned me that my battery life would drop. (This trick didn't work, they had to put in a multi-sector transmitter and a few more base stations anyway).
My 2c worth, though probably much of this would apply to using 802.11b to covering highly dense areas.
What if the current 56kbps modem links up to the 1M cable links are sufficient for most people's networking needs?
Its not the speed that will drag people away from 56K modems. The speed of ADSL, Cable, 802.11b, microwave wireless, etc is nice.
But constant connection is more important. There are uses for constant connections to the internet that do not require much bandwidth at all - eMail, control systems (eg., lighting, traffic signals), being able to serve data (like some file on your computer at home) plus the joy of always having the web available.
I think that alot of people on 56K dialup would be more happy for a 33K permanent connection if they had a static IP address to go with it.
A further (non speed) reason why 56 K connections will probably be replaced - lag. For any gamer, its the lag that kills even more than the lack of bandwidth. Modern modems add 100ms or so to a ping time, and fancy compression algorithms increase throughput AND lag simultaneously. Most other technologies (except satellite) don't.
In short, 56K modems are a stopgap data over voice solution that was cheap to deploy with the existing network structure. It is in no way likely to hold out against these other technologies. Even if the fixed connection stuff doesn't take off in a country, GPRS will do (even in the third world).
My 2c worth. Actually I've posted about 4 times this thread, must be my 8c worth.
Wrong - at least in the case of Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS, the system still in use in the USA).
That is probably the case. However, the discussion was not about the US analog systems. I do stand corrected about the US systems, however.
GSM will error-correct and continue with little degredation until the bit error rate exceeds the forward error correction capability, then BAM! you drop the call.
Actually, its not quite BAM! with GSM. During poor reception you usually have sound degredation when the signal quality is low and beyond the error correction rates. You don't get noise, but usually silent patches in the conversation.
One of the causes of, to use your description - BAM! dropped calls is poor handover between towers. Ive seen this in particular when you are flicking between two networks (ie., dual band stuff) held between different carries. Such as when Teleco A has roaming cover with Teleco B. When the reception is poor for A, then you move into an area with good reception for B while trying to keep a conversation going: BAM!:)
In theory, if you are going to use 802.11b on a large scale wouldn't you eventually reach a point where you would 'saturate' the frequency range alotted to this technology?
I would think for very crowded areas it would be better to use 802.11a - not for the higher bandwidth (Yes, sure a 50 MB/s link to the internet would be nice, of course) but because the cell size is much smaller. Of course penetration is not nearly as good, but alot less stuff runs at the 5 GHz bands than at the 2.4 GHz bands.
Then you've never been to Europe lately? Here, we have a decent GSM-network that almost never fails
GSM has an intrinsic part of its design to ramp down the power that the phones transmit at when the signals are strong. It was always designed to work in a crowded network. After all, it has a 35 Km range in its design, yet a cell in the centre of a city would theoretically cover most of even a large town.
This was one of the biggest problems with older analogue networks - they always transmitted at full power and had trouble with crowding out in densely populated areas.
As a bonus, your phone's batteries last alot longer in a city than in the country on a GSM network (but not on analog phone).
I've got 40 strong reasons why Linux will have a powerful desktop presence
Funny, I can only think of one: Open Office (/Star Office). Then again, I can only think of one reason why M$ have a strong desktop presence: MS Office. I mean, seriously, everything else has a non MS equivalent which is better. But in terms of a proprietary standard which everyone has to have, its MS Office. Just for Word alone they dominate the market.
Even MS know this - I can't see them issuing a version of MS office for Linux until they are facing a real risk of a minority share of the office market. Which is why they have never issued a version of office for Linux.
As for the rest, well. Photo editing? GIMP, PSP, Photoshop. Whatever. If you are a professional you may want all three. Video editing? Get an iMac now. And so on. But office dominates, and will continue to do so for a long while, at least in terms of file formats.
Having said all of that, I'm incredibly impressed with the open office stuff. Its great on Linux, but its probably even better for having a win 32 version. I can think of a heap of computers that I could install that on. Its version 1.0, it will still lose out feature wise with MS office, but from what I can see of it, most end users won't care for what it doesn't have.
By MS own figures, over 90% of feature requests for the next version of office are already implemented in the current version - most users have no idea of how to use even a fraction of the features. Thus, most users will like open office, and its good enough now to use now, even though it doesn't come close to the full feature set of MS office. And I don't doubt that version 2 will become very threatening to MS.
The fact that they can be expelled has no relation to to whether or not US laws might protect them. Your argument is not valid.
So are you saying that a visitor in the US has all the obligations under the law but no rights? That is my question here. (Including such things as a fair trial, the right to a lawyer to defend themselves, etc).
Is it a Windows thing? Maybe Hotmail, which isnt't really e-mail at all, more like marketing central.
Its definately a hotmail thing (as well as other ways of getting spam). I know this as I get spam directly to my hotmail account, which I never give out (its only used as a web interface for my incoming email to other addresses). So spammers are just guessing hotmail addresses I think and adding them to the list.
Just DON'T try to claim protection under the Constitution. As a non-citizen, you don't have the right to it. That's the point that was being made.
Point taken. However the original comment was a bit of overkill. To quote again:
If you break the law and you are not a US citizen, you have no rights and you can (and usually should) be deported.
There probably isn't a citizen in the first world that hasn't broken the law somewhere. Like making a video tape of a movie on TV. There are lots of laws, and most tourists end up breaking some just because they aren't aware of minor differences between two countries. I don't suppose that you read the law books of every country that you have visited now?
Just DON'T try to claim protection under the Constitution. As a non-citizen, you don't have the right to it.
Now, think about what you have said about my lack of rights under the US constitution. If I visit the US, do the police there have the right to beat me up because I am a "non-citizen", or shoot or kill me? If they do not, then I have rights under the US laws. I believe that I do. I just don't have the right to remain in the US - which is fair enough.
As I understand it, the US are keeping most of the Taliban fighters in Cuba because they would have alot more rights to lawyers in the US. No, I'm not saying I like what happened on 9/11/01 - many of my fellow nationals were fighting alongside US troops in Afganistan. But ask yourself why the US refuses to bring these people into the country? I believe its partly because they would have access a whole lot of legal rights, and if they were funded by Bin Laden they probably have access to enough money to use those rights to the fullest.
So I ask you again, are you sure I would have no rights in the US? Not even (for example) the right to a fair trial if I did break the law? Because thats the point I am arguing here.
This isn't said as flamebait. I'm interested in knowing the answer to these questions. I have enjoyed the times I've visited the US, but I guess I'd like to know that US citizens can't just take pot shots at me the moment they hear my accent. Which is how I interpreted the first post.
Because if you are a US citizen and you break the law you are entitled to certain rights.
If you break the law and you are not a US citizen, you have no rights and you can (and usually should) be deported.
What, so if a tourist hires a car while on holiday in the US and speeds, they should be deported?
Actually, I think you will find that if you break the law as a non US citizen, you go to a US jail, the same as anyone else. Or are you suggesting that if come to the US, buy a gun and shoot someone, my punishment should be deportation?
Actually, that analogy doesn't really seem very good at all, since ENCARTA IS NOT MADE BY COPYING BRITANICA'S ARTICLES, which is what in effect Napster and other music sharing programs do.
You are correct about the copying issues. However, I was referring more to the advancement in technology allowing distribution of information by a different medium. I'm just saying that you can't turn back the tide anyway.
Filesharing over the internet is a superior distribution network to buying CD's at a store. Encarta was about killing book encyclopedias and replacing them with a CD. MP3's are about killing CD as a means of distributing music.
Even if the major labels were to lock down CD's to be uncopyable (unlikely!) this medium would allow less well known groups to produce and distribute their own music. This is already happening. And this is my analogy to Encarta. Its not about copying music, its about sending music over the internet (legally or otherwise). Its unstoppable. Those who ignore it will suddenly find that they are no longer major players in music production, and that people don't even want to buy music on CD's.
The sort of company that will do well with internet music distribution will have to:
1. Basically destroy the entire music distribution structure. Stores, Freight, Middlemen. The lot. They won't like it one bit. They will still find work, of course. All those encyclopedia salesmen now seem to sell mobile phones.
2. Continue to sell music, but using the internet. (Whether its a secure format doesn't matter - Is encarta copy protected?)
3. Continue to advertise to generate demand (Some things never change!)
4. Make money out of related areas. For example:
-Sell memory stick players for you car (Why burn a CD? Memory sticks are getting big enough to hold whole albums.)
-Sell Labels, covers and printing software for those that want to produce their own CD.
-Tie in with related areas like live performances which people want to go to.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I see the analogy very stronly here. Its about a change in distribution technologies, not about copying.
They (record companies) seem determined to kill the goos that laid the golden egg. They'd rather have control than cash.
I think that they would rather have the cash.
Its more that they don't understand either the technology (which is probably unstoppable), or their own customers.
In particular, the major music labels don't seem to understand that:
1) Some people will pay money anyway for CD's if they like them enough.
2) Alot more people would buy the music if they sold them directly over the internet.
I personally believe that their sales would rocket up even at the same profit margins if they just dropped the cost of producing and distributing the CD's from the price of an internet download. This might only be a few dollars cheaper than what you pay to a major music store for the CD.
So what I think is happening here is the equivalent of what happened to encyclopedia salesmen with encarta. They were so locked in to a large existing sales network with high production costs that they could not bring themselves to cannibalise their own networks to maintain sales. This nearly destroyed the companies (such as britannica) before they finally did a U turn. People were happy to buy an inferior (M$ Encarta - not that it was bad, just less information) product because it was so much cheaper, and almost as good.
The analogy here of technology hitting an established high premium sales network is pretty tight. And I believe that the outcome will be the same. Eventually the networks will recognise this, and sell music tracks online for alot less than they currently do. They will prosper under this arrangement, although much of their distribution network will have to die in the process.
For the record, I can see the same thing ultimately happening with video, and a similar process of technological change is occuring with cameras and film. Our home computers will take on all of these tasks. We will still shop, but for production tools (printers, cameras) and 'raw' materials (blank CD's, DVD's high quality paper). Companies that get on this bandwagon will do well (ask Kodak), and those that pretend it isn't happening will go towards the wall (ask britannica!).
mmm. I'm probably wrong, for one thing not everybody spends 15 minutes a day on slashdot, not everyone looks every day, not everybody does it works, not everybody makes 20$/hour so that number is prolly too high.
And not everyone who reads/. lives in the US, either.
Isn't this a reason for corporations to be using Linux?
Microsoft has loaded up their system with so many features that its almost impossible to stop someone finding a backdoor way in. While you can pretty much tie up a M$ system, its not easy to do and you will probably be patching it till the cows come home. Surely better to have *nix systems which can really lock down the user to the required tasks? Particularly with regard to things like file accesses and so on? I still think that there is a huge potential here for *nix OS's - anything to do with security generally leaves M$ smelling less that rosy.
We added a second drive for windows and proceded to install NT, it hapilly informed us we had an invalid filesystem and it was reformating it to ntfs, it never asked, it just did it (because, of course on the alpha's back then basically every one wither ran true64 or NT, it reconized it was neither so it "helped" us). We lost nearly three months of work because of this.
If you have 3 months of un backed up work sitting on a HDD and you then decide to do a new OS install....
I'm not trying to justify M$ here - I think its the principle of not baking up your data, if its that important to you.
Let's install cameras everywhere and use them in a court as evidence.
You know, if you were robbed, you would be only too pleased to pull up the video evidence of it to help nail the person who did it.
Indeed, many people want cameras up in train stations and on trains (and probably would prefer to have a real person watching it to arrange for help if there was a problem). On a similar note of machine prediction, most of us are happy to have metal detectors at airports as a "predictor" of subsequent potential illegal acts.
So what gives? I think that what we are worrying about here is about a couple of themes:
1) The possibility that someone can collate and document your own activities and use innocent (and legal) behaviour against us. Of course, all bets are off with some groups. Just ask Bill about Monica - I don't think he actually broke the law, but everyone wanted to know anyway. (Ok, you expect a little scrutiny as a president!)
2) The possibility of persecution for acts which have never been commited, and where people are being judged on presumed intent. (Although most peopole still don't want guns on airplanes, funnily enough).
If this is the case, then what we need is more in the way of legislative (or ideally, constitutional) protection of: 1)rights to privacy, and 2)the presupposition of innocence.
These concepts do exist legally in some areas for protection of privacy (eg., Medical records) and from persecution (when accused of a major felony).
But they really don't exist at a day to day level for most people living normal lives. Protection against these actions with legal rights is probably the best solution here.
If not a very good comment then it should get moderated down.
Agreed. And you just have to wear it sometimes. Its more like when when someone gets a +1, informative moderation when there is no information in the post. Maybe its my interpretation of what "overrated" means.
If you're worried about your karma you should check that little box that allows you to post at score 1.
I'm not worried about the karma. Gettting modded back down to 49 every now and then just gives me a reason to work harder on the next post.
Little points about how you can get to certain parts of the screen faster than others.
Very little of this stuff filters down into the land of intel/amd.
Wrapping up my arguments nicely, the article was scored down as a troll.
What irritates me more is getting my default post ing score of 2 moderated with -1, overrated. I've had this a few times, and its frustrating to think that the person modding this didn't realise that it wasn't upwardly rated in the first place.
Still, I think you just have to wear that sort of moderation, no matter how much it irritates.
Slashdot Mirror
Are the KDE 3.0.1 RedHat RPM's out?
I cant find any - at least not yet.
Ok, newbie question:
How do I download all the RedHat RPM's in one go? Its really tedious clicking on all the rpm's in the folder. I'm sure there is a better way.
Michael
I'd just love some small nickel nuclear batteries for my palm organiser. Wouldn't need to make many milliwatts to keep an organiser going. (And a half life of 100+ years!).
Probably less damaging to the environment than 100 years of batteries, too.
Michael
If you are as like me, and filter out the -1's then I'll just quite post the original troll here. Its not that I approve of trolling, but the above response was so funny it made me go check the original. So, to save you a mouseclick:
Re:Funny, (Score:-1)
by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM on Thursday May 16
Stop whinning you fucking Linux hippies. How much money did you shell out to sign up for that hotmail account? $0.00 It's free as in beer. Now take that spam and shove it!
Except 12 million chinese schoolkids, who will eventually grow up and live in what is become the word's largest economy
I think that 12 million is a bit of an underestimate. Try 100 million and you would be a bit closer to the mark. If it were only 12 million children, it wouldn't become the world's largest economy. Of course, India could still take that badge.
Michael
I have complained about this to the Opera support groups [opera.com] but they told me it wasn't possible to do a "complete" fake header. If you want that I guess you have to rewrite user-agent headers with a proxy.
One agent (on Windows) that can do this is the proxomitron:
http://www.internetmall.net/prox/
Which I highly reccomend - it can totally rewrite any incoming and outgoing HTML. So it could make IE look like mozilla (No, I can't think of a reason to do this either).
Michael
The only reason your digital (PCS, GSM) phone's batteries last longer (and stays cooler, too) is because the signal is either on or off, 1 or 0.
You might be right, but I was very much of the opinion that the phone's transmission power was much more finely controlled in a GSM network. Aside from the obvious reason to do this - If you have a GSM phone pumping out at full power all the time it will take up the time/frequency slot allocated to it in a 35 km (or more) radius. In a densely populated areas that would cause a very hard limit on the number of mobile phones that can ever be used at once.
This is (one of) the reasons for banning mobile phones in aircraft. As your 737 comes in to land, everyone rings up their loved ones to say "I'll be home soon". While you are in the air, you are transmitting over the whole city, pretty much equally, taking out every base tower in that frequency (and with GSM, time) slot.
The other reason I believe that they phones output can be regulated was I lived in a small country town for a while and was the first user of a GSM phone there. The base station was badly set up, leading to multiple dropped calls. One of the temporary fixes that the technicians did was to instruct the phones on that cell to work at full power all the time, and warned me that my battery life would drop. (This trick didn't work, they had to put in a multi-sector transmitter and a few more base stations anyway).
My 2c worth, though probably much of this would apply to using 802.11b to covering highly dense areas.
Michael
What if the current 56kbps modem links up to the 1M cable links are sufficient for most people's networking needs?
Its not the speed that will drag people away from 56K modems. The speed of ADSL, Cable, 802.11b, microwave wireless, etc is nice.
But constant connection is more important. There are uses for constant connections to the internet that do not require much bandwidth at all - eMail, control systems (eg., lighting, traffic signals), being able to serve data (like some file on your computer at home) plus the joy of always having the web available.
I think that alot of people on 56K dialup would be more happy for a 33K permanent connection if they had a static IP address to go with it.
A further (non speed) reason why 56 K connections will probably be replaced - lag. For any gamer, its the lag that kills even more than the lack of bandwidth. Modern modems add 100ms or so to a ping time, and fancy compression algorithms increase throughput AND lag simultaneously. Most other technologies (except satellite) don't.
In short, 56K modems are a stopgap data over voice solution that was cheap to deploy with the existing network structure. It is in no way likely to hold out against these other technologies. Even if the fixed connection stuff doesn't take off in a country, GPRS will do (even in the third world).
My 2c worth. Actually I've posted about 4 times this thread, must be my 8c worth.
Michael
Wrong - at least in the case of Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS, the system still in use in the USA).
:)
That is probably the case. However, the discussion was not about the US analog systems. I do stand corrected about the US systems, however.
GSM will error-correct and continue with little degredation until the bit error rate exceeds the forward error correction capability, then BAM! you drop the call.
Actually, its not quite BAM! with GSM. During poor reception you usually have sound degredation when the signal quality is low and beyond the error correction rates. You don't get noise, but usually silent patches in the conversation.
One of the causes of, to use your description - BAM! dropped calls is poor handover between towers. Ive seen this in particular when you are flicking between two networks (ie., dual band stuff) held between different carries. Such as when Teleco A has roaming cover with Teleco B. When the reception is poor for A, then you move into an area with good reception for B while trying to keep a conversation going: BAM!
My 2c worth,
Michael
In theory, if you are going to use 802.11b on a large scale wouldn't you eventually reach a point where you would 'saturate' the frequency range alotted to this technology?
I would think for very crowded areas it would be better to use 802.11a - not for the higher bandwidth (Yes, sure a 50 MB/s link to the internet would be nice, of course) but because the cell size is much smaller. Of course penetration is not nearly as good, but alot less stuff runs at the 5 GHz bands than at the 2.4 GHz bands.
Michael
Then you've never been to Europe lately? Here, we have a decent GSM-network that almost never fails
GSM has an intrinsic part of its design to ramp down the power that the phones transmit at when the signals are strong. It was always designed to work in a crowded network. After all, it has a 35 Km range in its design, yet a cell in the centre of a city would theoretically cover most of even a large town.
This was one of the biggest problems with older analogue networks - they always transmitted at full power and had trouble with crowding out in densely populated areas.
As a bonus, your phone's batteries last alot longer in a city than in the country on a GSM network (but not on analog phone).
Yours,
Michael
I've got 40 strong reasons why Linux will have a powerful desktop presence
Funny, I can only think of one: Open Office (/Star Office). Then again, I can only think of one reason why M$ have a strong desktop presence: MS Office. I mean, seriously, everything else has a non MS equivalent which is better. But in terms of a proprietary standard which everyone has to have, its MS Office. Just for Word alone they dominate the market.
Even MS know this - I can't see them issuing a version of MS office for Linux until they are facing a real risk of a minority share of the office market. Which is why they have never issued a version of office for Linux.
As for the rest, well. Photo editing? GIMP, PSP, Photoshop. Whatever. If you are a professional you may want all three. Video editing? Get an iMac now. And so on. But office dominates, and will continue to do so for a long while, at least in terms of file formats.
Having said all of that, I'm incredibly impressed with the open office stuff. Its great on Linux, but its probably even better for having a win 32 version. I can think of a heap of computers that I could install that on. Its version 1.0, it will still lose out feature wise with MS office, but from what I can see of it, most end users won't care for what it doesn't have.
By MS own figures, over 90% of feature requests for the next version of office are already implemented in the current version - most users have no idea of how to use even a fraction of the features. Thus, most users will like open office, and its good enough now to use now, even though it doesn't come close to the full feature set of MS office. And I don't doubt that version 2 will become very threatening to MS.
Anyway, 'nuff said - my 2c worth
Michael
The fact that they can be expelled has no relation to to whether or not US laws might protect them. Your argument is not valid.
So are you saying that a visitor in the US has all the obligations under the law but no rights? That is my question here. (Including such things as a fair trial, the right to a lawyer to defend themselves, etc).
Michael
Is it a Windows thing? Maybe Hotmail, which isnt't really e-mail at all, more like marketing central.
Its definately a hotmail thing (as well as other ways of getting spam). I know this as I get spam directly to my hotmail account, which I never give out (its only used as a web interface for my incoming email to other addresses). So spammers are just guessing hotmail addresses I think and adding them to the list.
Michael
Just DON'T try to claim protection under the Constitution. As a non-citizen, you don't have the right to it. That's the point that was being made.
Point taken. However the original comment was a bit of overkill. To quote again:
If you break the law and you are not a US citizen, you have no rights and you can (and usually should) be deported.
There probably isn't a citizen in the first world that hasn't broken the law somewhere. Like making a video tape of a movie on TV. There are lots of laws, and most tourists end up breaking some just because they aren't aware of minor differences between two countries. I don't suppose that you read the law books of every country that you have visited now?
Just DON'T try to claim protection under the Constitution. As a non-citizen, you don't have the right to it.
Now, think about what you have said about my lack of rights under the US constitution. If I visit the US, do the police there have the right to beat me up because I am a "non-citizen", or shoot or kill me? If they do not, then I have rights under the US laws. I believe that I do. I just don't have the right to remain in the US - which is fair enough.
As I understand it, the US are keeping most of the Taliban fighters in Cuba because they would have alot more rights to lawyers in the US. No, I'm not saying I like what happened on 9/11/01 - many of my fellow nationals were fighting alongside US troops in Afganistan. But ask yourself why the US refuses to bring these people into the country? I believe its partly because they would have access a whole lot of legal rights, and if they were funded by Bin Laden they probably have access to enough money to use those rights to the fullest.
So I ask you again, are you sure I would have no rights in the US? Not even (for example) the right to a fair trial if I did break the law? Because thats the point I am arguing here.
This isn't said as flamebait. I'm interested in knowing the answer to these questions. I have enjoyed the times I've visited the US, but I guess I'd like to know that US citizens can't just take pot shots at me the moment they hear my accent. Which is how I interpreted the first post.
Michael
Because if you are a US citizen and you break the law you are entitled to certain rights.
If you break the law and you are not a US citizen, you have no rights and you can (and usually should) be deported.
What, so if a tourist hires a car while on holiday in the US and speeds, they should be deported?
Actually, I think you will find that if you break the law as a non US citizen, you go to a US jail, the same as anyone else. Or are you suggesting that if come to the US, buy a gun and shoot someone, my punishment should be deportation?
I don't think it works that way.
Michael
Actually, that analogy doesn't really seem very good at all, since ENCARTA IS NOT MADE BY COPYING BRITANICA'S ARTICLES, which is what in effect Napster and other music sharing programs do.
You are correct about the copying issues. However, I was referring more to the advancement in technology allowing distribution of information by a different medium. I'm just saying that you can't turn back the tide anyway.
Filesharing over the internet is a superior distribution network to buying CD's at a store. Encarta was about killing book encyclopedias and replacing them with a CD. MP3's are about killing CD as a means of distributing music.
Even if the major labels were to lock down CD's to be uncopyable (unlikely!) this medium would allow less well known groups to produce and distribute their own music. This is already happening. And this is my analogy to Encarta. Its not about copying music, its about sending music over the internet (legally or otherwise). Its unstoppable. Those who ignore it will suddenly find that they are no longer major players in music production, and that people don't even want to buy music on CD's.
The sort of company that will do well with internet music distribution will have to:
1. Basically destroy the entire music distribution structure. Stores, Freight, Middlemen. The lot. They won't like it one bit. They will still find work, of course. All those encyclopedia salesmen now seem to sell mobile phones.
2. Continue to sell music, but using the internet. (Whether its a secure format doesn't matter - Is encarta copy protected?)
3. Continue to advertise to generate demand (Some things never change!)
4. Make money out of related areas. For example:
-Sell memory stick players for you car (Why burn a CD? Memory sticks are getting big enough to hold whole albums.)
-Sell Labels, covers and printing software for those that want to produce their own CD.
-Tie in with related areas like live performances which people want to go to.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I see the analogy very stronly here. Its about a change in distribution technologies, not about copying.
Michael
They (record companies) seem determined to kill the goos that laid the golden egg. They'd rather have control than cash.
I think that they would rather have the cash.
Its more that they don't understand either the technology (which is probably unstoppable), or their own customers.
In particular, the major music labels don't seem to understand that:
1) Some people will pay money anyway for CD's if they like them enough.
2) Alot more people would buy the music if they sold them directly over the internet.
I personally believe that their sales would rocket up even at the same profit margins if they just dropped the cost of producing and distributing the CD's from the price of an internet download. This might only be a few dollars cheaper than what you pay to a major music store for the CD.
So what I think is happening here is the equivalent of what happened to encyclopedia salesmen with encarta. They were so locked in to a large existing sales network with high production costs that they could not bring themselves to cannibalise their own networks to maintain sales. This nearly destroyed the companies (such as britannica) before they finally did a U turn. People were happy to buy an inferior (M$ Encarta - not that it was bad, just less information) product because it was so much cheaper, and almost as good.
The analogy here of technology hitting an established high premium sales network is pretty tight. And I believe that the outcome will be the same. Eventually the networks will recognise this, and sell music tracks online for alot less than they currently do. They will prosper under this arrangement, although much of their distribution network will have to die in the process.
For the record, I can see the same thing ultimately happening with video, and a similar process of technological change is occuring with cameras and film. Our home computers will take on all of these tasks. We will still shop, but for production tools (printers, cameras) and 'raw' materials (blank CD's, DVD's high quality paper). Companies that get on this bandwagon will do well (ask Kodak), and those that pretend it isn't happening will go towards the wall (ask britannica!).
My 2c worth
Michael
mmm. I'm probably wrong, for one thing not everybody spends 15 minutes a day on slashdot, not everyone looks every day, not everybody does it works, not everybody makes 20$/hour so that number is prolly too high.
/. lives in the US, either.
And not everyone who reads
Michael
Isn't this a reason for corporations to be using Linux?
Microsoft has loaded up their system with so many features that its almost impossible to stop someone finding a backdoor way in. While you can pretty much tie up a M$ system, its not easy to do and you will probably be patching it till the cows come home. Surely better to have *nix systems which can really lock down the user to the required tasks? Particularly with regard to things like file accesses and so on? I still think that there is a huge potential here for *nix OS's - anything to do with security generally leaves M$ smelling less that rosy.
My 2c worth,
Michael
We added a second drive for windows and proceded to install NT, it hapilly informed us we had an invalid filesystem and it was reformating it to ntfs, it never asked, it just did it (because, of course on the alpha's back then basically every one wither ran true64 or NT, it reconized it was neither so it "helped" us). We lost nearly three months of work because of this.
....
If you have 3 months of un backed up work sitting on a HDD and you then decide to do a new OS install
I'm not trying to justify M$ here - I think its the principle of not baking up your data, if its that important to you.
Michael
Let's install cameras everywhere and use them in a court as evidence.
You know, if you were robbed, you would be only too pleased to pull up the video evidence of it to help nail the person who did it.
Indeed, many people want cameras up in train stations and on trains (and probably would prefer to have a real person watching it to arrange for help if there was a problem). On a similar note of machine prediction, most of us are happy to have metal detectors at airports as a "predictor" of subsequent potential illegal acts.
So what gives? I think that what we are worrying about here is about a couple of themes:
1) The possibility that someone can collate and document your own activities and use innocent (and legal) behaviour against us. Of course, all bets are off with some groups. Just ask Bill about Monica - I don't think he actually broke the law, but everyone wanted to know anyway. (Ok, you expect a little scrutiny as a president!)
2) The possibility of persecution for acts which have never been commited, and where people are being judged on presumed intent. (Although most peopole still don't want guns on airplanes, funnily enough).
If this is the case, then what we need is more in the way of legislative (or ideally, constitutional) protection of:
1)rights to privacy, and
2)the presupposition of innocence.
These concepts do exist legally in some areas for protection of privacy (eg., Medical records) and from persecution (when accused of a major felony).
But they really don't exist at a day to day level for most people living normal lives. Protection against these actions with legal rights is probably the best solution here.
Because the technology isn't going to go away.
My 2c worth - Michael
If not a very good comment then it should get moderated down.
Agreed. And you just have to wear it sometimes.
Its more like when when someone gets a +1, informative moderation when there is no information in the post.
Maybe its my interpretation of what "overrated" means.
If you're worried about your karma you should check that little box that allows you to post at score 1.
I'm not worried about the karma. Gettting modded back down to 49 every now and then just gives me a reason to work harder on the next post.
Michael.
In a previous posting [slashdot.org], I sum up what I think are the main reasons why Linux won't make it to the desktop just yet.
t ts.html
There is alot of work on interfaces. I found the stuff at AskTog well worthwhile:
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFi
Little points about how you can get to certain parts of the screen faster than others.
Very little of this stuff filters down into the land of intel/amd.
Wrapping up my arguments nicely, the article was scored down as a troll.
What irritates me more is getting my default post ing score of 2 moderated with -1, overrated. I've had this a few times, and its frustrating to think that the person modding this didn't realise that it wasn't upwardly rated in the first place.
Still, I think you just have to wear that sort of moderation, no matter how much it irritates.
My 2c worth,
Michael
I tried using ASP and it made me want to stick needles in my eye with it's horrible error messages and inability to return values from functions
I thought that you could return a value from a function using VB or similar? Or am I missing something here?
Michael
Spyware, reason #84 to use free/open source software [slashdot.org].
Yes, and they will just change the fast track logon server if too many people use this software to lock out this version.
If they did it to Morpheus, I can't see why they won't lock out this code either.
Mcihae;