At least the digitaldiva! story. Here is another case just like etoy vs. etoys, where two parties are doing an entirely different thing, and one of them can't stand it and sues over trademark.
Of course it was an evil frivolous lawsuit back when a "performance art" group was being threatened but if it's someone in the employ of the evil empire I guess it's a different story, regardless of how usefulupset that Stacy doesn't present herself as a know-it all and that's what this really is all about.
Here's something for both of you to consider, slashcode already provides the same easy, point and click style moderation for authors as the moderators get, only the authors have no reign on how they are allowed to moderate. I trust *most* of the authors in here to be good folks and only use their downward powers to balance out bad commetns that get modded up, or only moderate down those that truly need it.
So the question is, why are users allowed to moderate down at all? Sinply take your 5 points and look for funny/insightful stuff. I think OSDN should just go and hire about 5 people to manage all the sites they have that use a moderation system and let them go through and look for true flamebait and abuse. Just a thought.
Metamoderation has it's own criteria about who gets to do it, much like moderation. I think they throw out the last 25% of newly created accounts and also take karma into consideration.
Normally it appears about once every 24 hours on the main page. If you've never seen it that may be due to a bug in the old slashcode which kept certain people from ever seeing it, you had to discover and go there yourself. The bug also prevented people from being able to meta if they hadn't before a certain point (when they changed to the bug-code? THis is pretty much all fixed now from all reports.) However if you have positive karma and visit metamod.pl, you should be able to metamoderate now. It resets at 7 pm EST so if you just did it, you'll see it come up at the top of your page sometime between then and 8(depending on when apache delivers you the updated content.)
But the short answer to your question, is that you should see it at the top of your page whenever you are deemed worthy by the little pearl scripts that run this site. If it still doesn't come up I'd email Rob and or Cowboyneal and ask them about it, as I'm able to , so by your usernumber so should you be.
One word of warning, the present system allows you to make changes to the moderators karma for bad moderation, but there is an unusual check in place. If you disagree too often on moderations it will cause you to lose karma. For this reason I reccomend not disagreeing too often no matter what the comments say if your karma concerns you. Two or three bad moderations are about the most you'll be able to deal with per session, so go with ones that irk you the most, and leave any other bad moderations unchecked so the next meta-guy will get them, but for Gad's sake don't approve anything you aren't comfortable with! For other questions about metamoderation try the the semiofficial sid.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Re:Regrettably, snail mail is probably best...
on
Million E-mail March
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· Score: 2
There are a few reasons for this. The fact that it is "too convenient" is one of them. Also consider the fact that the reps I elect (from Florida) don't give a rat's ass what someone in Deleware thinks they should do. And with email there really isn't anything like a postmark to give evidence that the person writing has any impact on whether you get re-elected or not. So say a representative gets 4000 letters all from his district. That says something. 4000 emails from Alaska, Hawaii, Sweden, wherever don't really say much. And of course they aren't going to be arsed to try to determine where it came from by the ISP in the return-path, unless it was threatening.
Oh, and of course there are also other reasons why email isn't going to carry as much weight as paper at least for a little while.
Apparently. It also got deleted, which makes the next question-In the interest of full disclosure and completely being upfront...WHAT WAS IT? Inquiring minds want to know.
I believe that slapdash.org is one of the domains that someone registered to point to slashdot...when they had the server change slapdash stopped working, when I asked about it on slashcode it was news, at least to pudge, so it seems that the/. crew had nothing to do with that one.
Let's see, a still-working site, or
#
#w00t
w00t- not found
#rm -rf/home/
#rm -rf/var/MySQL/
Of course that's overly simplistic, but think about it. Even if the person found the security hole, and sent in a a patch privately, who's to say the discoverer or someone else hasn't already been quitely exploiting it? Of course now that an exploit has been found (and assuming they DID get the email), There still exists an exploit.
They'll still have to check and make sure that's what really happened, examine their entire system and probably do a whole lot of reinstalling, but that's what happens. I would hope they'd be doing that anyway if someone turned in an exploit+patch.
Which also brings up another point. This site in particular seems to have an inordinate amount of content being passed back and forth that is simply incredulous. How many times a week must Rob &Co. get email to the effect of "3y3 0VVn Jo0!"? How do you know when someone is serious? When the hacker posts a story about it, of course! I'd say this is probably the best (if not funniest) way to let everyone know at once. BTW I do feel sorry for the crew up there having all the shit to go through that they must right now.
One question I do want to see answered, even before the how-to on the crack...EXactly what DID they put in the 1rst post that got it deleted so quickly? Remember that The policy on/. is no to delete posts unless there's something messing with the page display, was it that infamous hello.jpg, or worse?
At least they didn't post a who's who by seeing which accounts passwords all matched, eh? Could be pretty embarrassing to some of those who have special "blow off steam" accounts.
If you want to do something that is actually worthwhile (and c'mon, a contest run by geeks for geeks is not it), take some of the examples, as well as some completely legitimate sites that were not meant to trip any filters, and list about 25 of them on a flyer. Then find 25 sites that are completely innappropriate for anyone* to view, and are *NOT* blocked, and list those.
Okay, everyone go pick one brand of filtering S/W and do this. Print a paragraph explaining that this instituition uses brand-X filter, include a breif synopsis of what to expect on a few of the sites, and either tape it up next to the computers or hand it out outside the library. This is something those of you doing the goatsex redirects would absolutely love, find a URL for it that hasn't been blocked and encourage people to leave their terminal on that when they leave (Okay, maybe that won't help the cause, but make sure they understand what hello.jpg is and that it's only a click or two away.)
Write another paragraph encouraging people to ask their librarian who to complain to about getting said censorware removed, and provide email addresses to the customer service contacts for the censorware companies.
*That* would be worthwhile. In fact, Rob, since you enjoy the embarassment and ridicule of censorware companies, why not host a project that has printable postscript of such files? It seems like a much more effective way to get word out to the people than having cphack.exe source code posted all over your stories like a couple of months ago. Or if someone wants to start a sourceforge page for such a project, please submit it as a story.
*Hey I said it was innapropriate, noone to blame but yourself if you click without reading...
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Re:Action Figure Piracy
on
3D Printers
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· Score: 1
Actually, this would be great. I wasn't too terribly impressed with the quake2 action figures that were out there, and I'd love to have a shelf full of the ppms that are out there or that and Q3...
I understand that. What Mr. King seems to think, however(from the quote above), is that we should gladly pay separately for *each* format or copy that we download. I see a problem with this logic on a couple of levels.
1. If I buy a paperback, I may not get the rights to take a hardcover as well, however I'm free to read that paperback anywhere I'm able to read. Getting my book digitally, in say a.pdf file(used as an example because they look so nice on my desktop), I feel I should also be able to read this on my palm on the subway(where a pdf probably wouldn't look quite as nice). This particular argument is nothing but opinion, I'll admit, but I can't imagine someone wanting me to pay twice just to get a text copy, or html document of the same data, I already purchased the right to read it, I should be able to do so in any means I choose.
2. The cost of reproduction is zero. This translates to zero scarcity. The knowledge of this breaks down people's willingness to spend any more money than they have to. I don't purport that the author should not be paid, but generally the point of cutting out the middleman is to get a better deal out of distrobution. The consumers will want a better deal as well, knowing this.
3. In a bookstore environment there are often very good reasons for wanting to spend money on something you've purchased once- the special leather-bound edition with the gold leaf and the nifty fake-silk bookmark; the one the author signed that you'll never crack open again, shrink wrap and put on E-bay if you go broke, and the first printing you run across in some used book store, where the owner has no idea it's worth $32k.
I especially want to emphasis #3. I've said it before in regards to mp3's and movies. If the people who put this out want us to pay more than once for something, they had better give us a good reason to. Stephen has a pretty cute idea going with the "installment" plan on his books, and it *IS* very_good to see him offer the books in so many formats, his attitude towards people wanting to get them all disturbs me. If the content is the same I say let them get whatever they choose. It just wouldn't feel right to me to present data to a paying customer in HTML format and then charge them again to strip out the tags.
I know I'm just blathering on and on here, but I wanted to mention one other thing. It feels a little like we are being set up for a fall here, and if it were any other author, or some 4 letter acronymic agency releasing this I would not be surprised to see a big press release saying "Theives! This is why we need to use closed, copy-protected and annoying formats gauranteed to deny you your fair use rights." I was going to make a much better posting, but it's hard to think straight at work. People just interrupt you and
It appears to us that some people are downloading two and even three times to different formats-to the Palm Pilot say, and also to whatever Microsoft uses. This may be based on a simple misperception. Let me put it this way: you couldn't go into a bookstore and say, "I want you to give me the paperback version and the audio version of this book free because I bought the hardcover." simply as I can put it, you must pay for what you take every time you take it or this won't work.
Simply as I can put it, the problem you see, Mr. King, is the overwhelming advantage to using electrons instead of dead trees. The bookstore analogy is obvious, of course you would expect to pay twice for something that was printed and bound on a physical medium. Of course I would also have then have the right to make archival copies of that work, or sell the work to a third party. With digital mediums these rights are pretty much lost. The least I would expect is either 1)A cross-platform file that I am able to copy from system to system, or 2)The ability to download it to whatever platform I like. Without either of those I fail to see any advantage at all to me as a consumer to buy digital over pulp.
The verbage as I remember it was that there would be an "open"(read gratis) version available online. Has the book already been published and in stores? I would have thought there would have been a big announcement here (If not then perhaps they're in for another round of flaming? At least this article is appropriate and fairly ontopic for the subject.)
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Re:You can't ambush somebody with a contract.
on
CueCat At It Again
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· Score: 2
Don't like it, DC? Include some return postage.
They could if they wanted, but you're still under no obligation to return it. As you stated, they abandoned it in your mailbox. And wouldn't it be considered mail fraud to imply that you have obligations to uphold on something that they sent you unprompted in the mail?
Maybe some better paid geeks than me could get a lawyer (Any openlaw people here want to take it up?) drafting a cease and desist letter to send to DC, to force them to stop using any sort of EULA on the devices they are mass mailing. That would also make a really nice press release, something that might even make the major news outlets, the ones that investors read.
I almost felt sorry for this company a couple of weeks ago. Then I installed their S/W. Looks like I'll have to go get another one that isn't covered by their EULA, and have some fun with it.
It doesn't matter in the long run. There will always be artists, and there will always be a demnd for art. The demand for art will never manage to feed the artists, somehow. These things haven't changed since recorded history, and there's no reason to believe that some nebulous construct like the "Recording industry" we have today will mke any difference.
All these companies are only wasting time and money trying to prevent the inevitable. I'm not going to argue ethics here, because frankly it doesn't make a difference whether people think they're in the right or not, copying music. The fact is that the music only has to be converted once, and then copied as many times as neccesary to destroy any such "inconvenience" scheme the Corps come up with. Even if it involves a padded box containing a speaker and a microphone, once 1 decent copy is made, it's over.
The only way they will win is by providing a superior product, that has value added for purchasing the physical medium. And as copying becomes easier and easier, their job of keeping us entertained and making money will neccesarily get more and more competitive. Either way, it's still the only win-win situation in the foreseable future.
BTW, good job up there with the CBC web site. I hope they do not bow to NBC and take down the scores. If you want to piss off the IOC and show what you feel of NBC and it's pathetic coverage, then please spread the results like wildfire as soon as they come in. Don't even say the word "spoiler", just post anywhere and start listing scores.
I would reccomend looking at the shiny spots and faults alike on the more popular (read:more often installed) OS's out there and try to improve upon those concepts. Above all else, try to have "glossy-eyed newbie" and "I can install Windows" modes as well as the "I want to fdisk my hardrive in the most primitive editor you got" type, which a lot of folks still prefer.
For the newbie/assisted install, try to probe for as much stuff as you safely can to minimize confusion. Also keep in mind that lines like;
It appears you have a [fxy339 10/100+due/ipx with added dongle support, revision 667], is this correct? [y/n]
Will scare the living bejesus out of someone who's never installed an OS before, so maybe don't have things like that in the first timer section. Just try to set it up for them and they can maybe try the next level install with a friend if nothing works right.
Another thing, half the time an intermediate user will find they forgot to do something right on the network setup or maybe the sound card doesn't work right after installation, post install setup is muy importante. The approach earlier Red Hat (can't say about now) and slackware distros is nice. Individual parts of the setup (like modemtool, soundtool, netconfig, etc) may be run from the CLI. Try to integrate this into the setup program itself, so the person can just type "setup" and reconfigure any part of their system from curses or X, without having to know the name of the specific thing they're looking for.
One last suggestion I'd like to make is the applications selection. Try to get a 1 paragraph blurb about each package offered, and then group all the similar apps together for selection, an example would be;
Word Processors(check any or all
that interest you)-
[] VI. The classic text editor of Unix
hackers. Has a lot of ~'s in it. Don't
be frightened however, you'll get it.
[]Emacs. The classic text editor of Unix
hackers. Click on "tools" then "read
news" to find interesting porno.
[]Pico. The weenie text editor. It has
all the commands at the bottom. Check
this box and be a weenie.
The user could check off any that interest them, and then remove them from their system at a later time simply by returning to setup (see previous paragraph) and entering the "apps" section. Just a few suggestions for the ideal installer. Stea^h^h^hUse them as you will.
What's wrong with the downloadable mp3 format? Well, actually I was going to reply in a different thread about this very thing so here goes;
OGG VORBIS.
Please for the love of God push this down the throat of whoever you have to at the sync to offer this free alternative to the.mp3. Remember we are supposed to be supporting open formats. By offering GIS in only a closed, proprietary and evil format, and one that involves patent and license issues we are not putting our money where are mouth is.
Just a suggestion. Anyway, for the AC above, get X11-amp or some equivalent, and the ogg vorbis plugin, and continue to reccomend it to the gang here:-)
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 1
More real action
OPENLAW. Right now they're working on getting the Sonny Boner act repealed. It looks like an uphill battle, and any brains/publicity/money they recieve will help. I suppose a full/. article may be too much to expect, though I'm submitting it as well.
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 1
I'm not talking about a one off 5kript kiddie attack here, I'm imagining full out terrorist action. Every server they own, every website.
Wow. I sure hope that pipex.com doesn't mind a carnivore system hung off their servers, 'cause I think you just earned them one;^)
That's true, however the stated purpose of the GPL is to empower users rights, not programmers. The idea is that by avoiding situations where you reinvent the wheel, the quality of S/W available should only get better. If the licenses are very similar, yet still incompatable, that would force developers to reinvent, and reimplement anything they'd normally be able to just copy/paste with the appropriate license. This hurts the end user because it slows developement- as the developers both rewrite and do even more license checking to make sure they don't violate the GPL themselves, rendering their code undistributable.
It's a shame that the article doesn't go into any more detail as to what exactly is incompatible, however the issue doesn't seem as serious as one would make it out to be. Developers using 1.6 would simply need to make sure that the licenses they choose will not conflict, otherwise they may need to find a suitable alternative language to use.
Slashdot Mirror
At least the digitaldiva! story. Here is another case just like etoy vs. etoys, where two parties are doing an entirely different thing, and one of them can't stand it and sues over trademark.
Of course it was an evil frivolous lawsuit back when a "performance art" group was being threatened but if it's someone in the employ of the evil empire I guess it's a different story, regardless of how usefulupset that Stacy doesn't present herself as a know-it all and that's what this really is all about.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Here's something for both of you to consider, slashcode already provides the same easy, point and click style moderation for authors as the moderators get, only the authors have no reign on how they are allowed to moderate. I trust *most* of the authors in here to be good folks and only use their downward powers to balance out bad commetns that get modded up, or only moderate down those that truly need it.
So the question is, why are users allowed to moderate down at all? Sinply take your 5 points and look for funny/insightful stuff. I think OSDN should just go and hire about 5 people to manage all the sites they have that use a moderation system and let them go through and look for true flamebait and abuse. Just a thought.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Metamoderation has it's own criteria about who gets to do it, much like moderation. I think they throw out the last 25% of newly created accounts and also take karma into consideration.
Normally it appears about once every 24 hours on the main page. If you've never seen it that may be due to a bug in the old slashcode which kept certain people from ever seeing it, you had to discover and go there yourself. The bug also prevented people from being able to meta if they hadn't before a certain point (when they changed to the bug-code? THis is pretty much all fixed now from all reports.) However if you have positive karma and visit metamod.pl, you should be able to metamoderate now. It resets at 7 pm EST so if you just did it, you'll see it come up at the top of your page sometime between then and 8(depending on when apache delivers you the updated content.)
But the short answer to your question, is that you should see it at the top of your page whenever you are deemed worthy by the little pearl scripts that run this site. If it still doesn't come up I'd email Rob and or Cowboyneal and ask them about it, as I'm able to , so by your usernumber so should you be.
One word of warning, the present system allows you to make changes to the moderators karma for bad moderation, but there is an unusual check in place. If you disagree too often on moderations it will cause you to lose karma. For this reason I reccomend not disagreeing too often no matter what the comments say if your karma concerns you. Two or three bad moderations are about the most you'll be able to deal with per session, so go with ones that irk you the most, and leave any other bad moderations unchecked so the next meta-guy will get them, but for Gad's sake don't approve anything you aren't comfortable with! For other questions about metamoderation try the the semiofficial sid.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
There are a few reasons for this. The fact that it is "too convenient" is one of them. Also consider the fact that the reps I elect (from Florida) don't give a rat's ass what someone in Deleware thinks they should do. And with email there really isn't anything like a postmark to give evidence that the person writing has any impact on whether you get re-elected or not. So say a representative gets 4000 letters all from his district. That says something. 4000 emails from Alaska, Hawaii, Sweden, wherever don't really say much. And of course they aren't going to be arsed to try to determine where it came from by the ISP in the return-path, unless it was threatening.
Oh, and of course there are also other reasons why email isn't going to carry as much weight as paper at least for a little while.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Apparently. It also got deleted, which makes the next question-In the interest of full disclosure and completely being upfront...WHAT WAS IT? Inquiring minds want to know.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
I believe that slapdash.org is one of the domains that someone registered to point to slashdot...when they had the server change slapdash stopped working, when I asked about it on slashcode it was news, at least to pudge, so it seems that the /. crew had nothing to do with that one.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
There's no such thing as a friendly hack.
/home/
/var/MySQL/
/. is no to delete posts unless there's something messing with the page display, was it that infamous hello.jpg, or worse?
Let's see, a still-working site, or
#
#w00t
w00t- not found
#rm -rf
#rm -rf
Of course that's overly simplistic, but think about it. Even if the person found the security hole, and sent in a a patch privately, who's to say the discoverer or someone else hasn't already been quitely exploiting it? Of course now that an exploit has been found (and assuming they DID get the email), There still exists an exploit.
They'll still have to check and make sure that's what really happened, examine their entire system and probably do a whole lot of reinstalling, but that's what happens. I would hope they'd be doing that anyway if someone turned in an exploit+patch.
Which also brings up another point. This site in particular seems to have an inordinate amount of content being passed back and forth that is simply incredulous. How many times a week must Rob &Co. get email to the effect of "3y3 0VVn Jo0!"? How do you know when someone is serious? When the hacker posts a story about it, of course! I'd say this is probably the best (if not funniest) way to let everyone know at once. BTW I do feel sorry for the crew up there having all the shit to go through that they must right now.
One question I do want to see answered, even before the how-to on the crack...EXactly what DID they put in the 1rst post that got it deleted so quickly? Remember that The policy on
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
At least they didn't post a who's who by seeing which accounts passwords all matched, eh? Could be pretty embarrassing to some of those who have special "blow off steam" accounts.
Sincerely,
Bruce Perens*
*Joke, get it? Joke.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
If you want to do something that is actually worthwhile (and c'mon, a contest run by geeks for geeks is not it), take some of the examples, as well as some completely legitimate sites that were not meant to trip any filters, and list about 25 of them on a flyer. Then find 25 sites that are completely innappropriate for anyone* to view, and are *NOT* blocked, and list those.
Okay, everyone go pick one brand of filtering S/W and do this. Print a paragraph explaining that this instituition uses brand-X filter, include a breif synopsis of what to expect on a few of the sites, and either tape it up next to the computers or hand it out outside the library. This is something those of you doing the goatsex redirects would absolutely love, find a URL for it that hasn't been blocked and encourage people to leave their terminal on that when they leave (Okay, maybe that won't help the cause, but make sure they understand what hello.jpg is and that it's only a click or two away.)
Write another paragraph encouraging people to ask their librarian who to complain to about getting said censorware removed, and provide email addresses to the customer service contacts for the censorware companies.
*That* would be worthwhile. In fact, Rob, since you enjoy the embarassment and ridicule of censorware companies, why not host a project that has printable postscript of such files? It seems like a much more effective way to get word out to the people than having cphack.exe source code posted all over your stories like a couple of months ago. Or if someone wants to start a sourceforge page for such a project, please submit it as a story.
*Hey I said it was innapropriate, noone to blame but yourself if you click without reading...
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Actually, this would be great. I wasn't too terribly impressed with the quake2 action figures that were out there, and I'd love to have a shelf full of the ppms that are out there or that and Q3...
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
I understand that. What Mr. King seems to think, however(from the quote above), is that we should gladly pay separately for *each* format or copy that we download. I see a problem with this logic on a couple of levels.
.pdf file(used as an example because they look so nice on my desktop), I feel I should also be able to read this on my palm on the subway(where a pdf probably wouldn't look quite as nice). This particular argument is nothing but opinion, I'll admit, but I can't imagine someone wanting me to pay twice just to get a text copy, or html document of the same data, I already purchased the right to read it, I should be able to do so in any means I choose.
1. If I buy a paperback, I may not get the rights to take a hardcover as well, however I'm free to read that paperback anywhere I'm able to read. Getting my book digitally, in say a
2. The cost of reproduction is zero. This translates to zero scarcity. The knowledge of this breaks down people's willingness to spend any more money than they have to. I don't purport that the author should not be paid, but generally the point of cutting out the middleman is to get a better deal out of distrobution. The consumers will want a better deal as well, knowing this.
3. In a bookstore environment there are often very good reasons for wanting to spend money on something you've purchased once- the special leather-bound edition with the gold leaf and the nifty fake-silk bookmark; the one the author signed that you'll never crack open again, shrink wrap and put on E-bay if you go broke, and the first printing you run across in some used book store, where the owner has no idea it's worth $32k.
I especially want to emphasis #3. I've said it before in regards to mp3's and movies. If the people who put this out want us to pay more than once for something, they had better give us a good reason to. Stephen has a pretty cute idea going with the "installment" plan on his books, and it *IS* very_good to see him offer the books in so many formats, his attitude towards people wanting to get them all disturbs me. If the content is the same I say let them get whatever they choose. It just wouldn't feel right to me to present data to a paying customer in HTML format and then charge them again to strip out the tags.
I know I'm just blathering on and on here, but I wanted to mention one other thing. It feels a little like we are being set up for a fall here, and if it were any other author, or some 4 letter acronymic agency releasing this I would not be surprised to see a big press release saying "Theives! This is why we need to use closed, copy-protected and annoying formats gauranteed to deny you your fair use rights." I was going to make a much better posting, but it's hard to think straight at work. People just interrupt you and
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
It appears to us that some people are downloading two and even three times to different formats-to the Palm Pilot say, and also to whatever Microsoft uses. This may be based on a simple misperception. Let me put it this way: you couldn't go into a bookstore and say, "I want you to give me the paperback version and the audio version of this book free because I bought the hardcover." simply as I can put it, you must pay for what you take every time you take it or this won't work.
Simply as I can put it, the problem you see, Mr. King, is the overwhelming advantage to using electrons instead of dead trees. The bookstore analogy is obvious, of course you would expect to pay twice for something that was printed and bound on a physical medium. Of course I would also have then have the right to make archival copies of that work, or sell the work to a third party. With digital mediums these rights are pretty much lost. The least I would expect is either 1)A cross-platform file that I am able to copy from system to system, or 2)The ability to download it to whatever platform I like. Without either of those I fail to see any advantage at all to me as a consumer to buy digital over pulp.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
The verbage as I remember it was that there would be an "open"(read gratis) version available online. Has the book already been published and in stores? I would have thought there would have been a big announcement here (If not then perhaps they're in for another round of flaming? At least this article is appropriate and fairly ontopic for the subject.)
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Don't like it, DC? Include some return postage.
They could if they wanted, but you're still under no obligation to return it. As you stated, they abandoned it in your mailbox. And wouldn't it be considered mail fraud to imply that you have obligations to uphold on something that they sent you unprompted in the mail?
Maybe some better paid geeks than me could get a lawyer (Any openlaw people here want to take it up?) drafting a cease and desist letter to send to DC, to force them to stop using any sort of EULA on the devices they are mass mailing. That would also make a really nice press release, something that might even make the major news outlets, the ones that investors read.
I almost felt sorry for this company a couple of weeks ago. Then I installed their S/W. Looks like I'll have to go get another one that isn't covered by their EULA, and have some fun with it.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
It doesn't matter in the long run. There will always be artists, and there will always be a demnd for art. The demand for art will never manage to feed the artists, somehow. These things haven't changed since recorded history, and there's no reason to believe that some nebulous construct like the "Recording industry" we have today will mke any difference.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
All these companies are only wasting time and money trying to prevent the inevitable. I'm not going to argue ethics here, because frankly it doesn't make a difference whether people think they're in the right or not, copying music. The fact is that the music only has to be converted once, and then copied as many times as neccesary to destroy any such "inconvenience" scheme the Corps come up with. Even if it involves a padded box containing a speaker and a microphone, once 1 decent copy is made, it's over.
The only way they will win is by providing a superior product, that has value added for purchasing the physical medium. And as copying becomes easier and easier, their job of keeping us entertained and making money will neccesarily get more and more competitive. Either way, it's still the only win-win situation in the foreseable future.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
BTW, good job up there with the CBC web site. I hope they do not bow to NBC and take down the scores. If you want to piss off the IOC and show what you feel of NBC and it's pathetic coverage, then please spread the results like wildfire as soon as they come in. Don't even say the word "spoiler", just post anywhere and start listing scores.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
For the newbie/assisted install, try to probe for as much stuff as you safely can to minimize confusion. Also keep in mind that lines like;
Will scare the living bejesus out of someone who's never installed an OS before, so maybe don't have things like that in the first timer section. Just try to set it up for them and they can maybe try the next level install with a friend if nothing works right.
Another thing, half the time an intermediate user will find they forgot to do something right on the network setup or maybe the sound card doesn't work right after installation, post install setup is muy importante. The approach earlier Red Hat (can't say about now) and slackware distros is nice. Individual parts of the setup (like modemtool, soundtool, netconfig, etc) may be run from the CLI. Try to integrate this into the setup program itself, so the person can just type "setup" and reconfigure any part of their system from curses or X, without having to know the name of the specific thing they're looking for.
One last suggestion I'd like to make is the applications selection. Try to get a 1 paragraph blurb about each package offered, and then group all the similar apps together for selection, an example would be;
Word Processors(check any or all
that interest you)-
[] VI. The classic text editor of Unix
hackers. Has a lot of ~'s in it. Don't
be frightened however, you'll get it.
[]Emacs. The classic text editor of Unix
hackers. Click on "tools" then "read
news" to find interesting porno.
[]Pico. The weenie text editor. It has
all the commands at the bottom. Check
this box and be a weenie.
The user could check off any that interest them, and then remove them from their system at a later time simply by returning to setup (see previous paragraph) and entering the "apps" section. Just a few suggestions for the ideal installer. Stea^h^h^hUse them as you will.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Pimply Faced Yout. Go to the register.co.uk and search for the BOFH (Bastard Operator from Hell) for more info.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Are you scared about the merger yet?
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
What's wrong with the downloadable mp3 format? Well, actually I was going to reply in a different thread about this very thing so here goes;
.mp3. Remember we are supposed to be supporting open formats. By offering GIS in only a closed, proprietary and evil format, and one that involves patent and license issues we are not putting our money where are mouth is.
:-)
OGG VORBIS.
Please for the love of God push this down the throat of whoever you have to at the sync to offer this free alternative to the
Just a suggestion. Anyway, for the AC above, get X11-amp or some equivalent, and the ogg vorbis plugin, and continue to reccomend it to the gang here
remember: fsck is not magic.
:(
Depends on your technique.
Oh wait, that wasn't a euphamism, nevermind
More real action
/. article may be too much to expect, though I'm submitting it as well.
OPENLAW. Right now they're working on getting the Sonny Boner act repealed. It looks like an uphill battle, and any brains/publicity/money they recieve will help. I suppose a full
I'm not talking about a one off 5kript kiddie attack here, I'm imagining full out terrorist action. Every server they own, every website.
;^)
Wow. I sure hope that pipex.com doesn't mind a carnivore system hung off their servers, 'cause I think you just earned them one
That's true, however the stated purpose of the GPL is to empower users rights, not programmers. The idea is that by avoiding situations where you reinvent the wheel, the quality of S/W available should only get better. If the licenses are very similar, yet still incompatable, that would force developers to reinvent, and reimplement anything they'd normally be able to just copy/paste with the appropriate license. This hurts the end user because it slows developement- as the developers both rewrite and do even more license checking to make sure they don't violate the GPL themselves, rendering their code undistributable.
It's a shame that the article doesn't go into any more detail as to what exactly is incompatible, however the issue doesn't seem as serious as one would make it out to be. Developers using 1.6 would simply need to make sure that the licenses they choose will not conflict, otherwise they may need to find a suitable alternative language to use.