Which corrupt hellhole do you live in? I think you'll find the overwhelming majority of first-world companies stay within the law, and they don't ever get applauded for it. Compliance with the law is the norm, not the exception.
Each unit is now subject to US Copyright violation penalties, which vary from $20k to $200k per-unit (look it up).
IANAL, but I suspect it's per violation, not per unit. Each unit contains code from many projects. Not providing the source for the Linux kernel they used would be one violation. Not providing the source for the Busybox they used would be another and so on and so on. [I don't know exactly what they actually used, they're just examples]
Incidentally, according to the GPL it doesn't matter if they modified the source or not, they have to provide the source they used to anyone to whom they provided the binary.
I would help out with the OLPC, but I guess I'm just not nice enough to make a pure cash donation or I would have done. I was all ready to go for the give-one-get-one, but for whatever reason they don't care about the $200 they would have got from me, or my (modest) skills writing code and offering support, because I'm one of the 93% of the planet's population who don't live in the US or Canada. So instead of my cash funding a laptop for a kid in the developing world it's going to end up lining the pockets of first-world shareholders. *shrug*
But Microsoft don't price competitively. They charge 5-12 times what GameSpy charge for the same service and infinitely more than Sony and Nintendo. $5-10 a month would be reasonable for access to high quality hosted servers and $0 per month would be reasonable to allow you to play directly using an XBox as the server. AFAIK, there is no option but XBox Live Gold if you want to play on-line, you can't just type in the IP of your clan server or find a free, public server.
Bittorrent is good for P2P and non-profit stuff (Linux ISOs, for example), but for commercial content distribution I feel the same way as I do about XBox Live - they can either pay me (in the form of a discount) to cover the cost of the bandwidth I'm providing or pay for their own f*ing bandwidth.
A 3-month game card (the link I found to the 12 month was broken and the "sign up" link on the UK XBox site does nothing when I click on it) costs £15 (~$30). And for something you get for free (PS3, DS, Wii) or for $10 per year (Gamespy) elsewhere, yes, $5-10 a month is substantial.
But really what I'd appreciate is some sort of network inspection, topology tool so you could figure out who was the best choice to host in a game. Even in circumstances when there's not much to do about a problem, like latency, it'd be better to just know what and where the problem was, as opposed to just observing it and wondering about its origin. Not to mention, all the data put together would give a very good measure of network performance offered by the various ISPs.
Wouldn't it be even better if for your substantial monthly subscription Microsoft provided the servers, which could thereby be guaranteed adequate bandwidth and good latency (at least to the backbone)? It's absurd that you pay money to Microsoft then have to host the damn games on your own system.
I hate Thompson as much as anybody, and he may well deserve to be disbarred, but I don't think it's fair to do so for the reasons stated. He didn't invent claims out of nothing, he made interpretations of real things that were quite, uh, inflammatory. His reasoning was ridiculous, but not patently absurd. There's a logic to them that can't be categorically called false.
It's not that what he said is categorically false, it's that it's not categorically true, which is what he claimed. He didn't say "I suspect..." or "I have information which may suggest...", he said "X has done [very serious illegal thing]" with essentially no evidence, certainly no proof, that that is the case. For a lawyer to make claims like that, they had better be very fucking sure they're right and able to prove they're right.
What a defeatist attitude. Why not try to change it into the world in which you want to live? You can be damn sure someone else is trying to change it into the world they want to live in, which may well be at odds with the world you want to live in, so if you just "learn to live with it" you're setting yourself up to be shat on from a great height.
If you don't like the idea of personal information being mined in this way, talk to your friends and write to your elected representatives. Try to raise awareness, get the law changed to raise the bar for what it considered "personally identifiable", increase the funds available for enforcement of breaches of personal privacy; there are a number of things you can do to push the world in the direction you want. Alone you might not achieve much, but if you never try you'll never know how un-alone you are in your views. Excepting natural events (which we can increasingly control too), all the things which have changed in human society were changed by people. If you just learn to live with whatever changes, you'll never be one of those people who decide how things change. At the absolute minimum, vote.
I had (still have, in fact) a Sony NW-E3 which would only play ATRAC-3 files, not MP3. Given that was my only digital music at the time (this was the late 90s), it wasn't a major problem. It was half the size of the competition and had the best interface I've ever used on a portable device (a twiddly knob on the top, with a play/pause button in the middle - not that there was much skipping about with only 64 MiB of storage!). Many of their phones of the same era had a jog-dial, which was a similarly awesome interface. Now that compatibility between devices is more important that a decade ago I've given up on Sony.
I've never understood why some people think having an uninteligible sliver of/. (or whatever) appearing between a toolbar and a document is a good thing.
I won't pretend to be an expert, but I don't see how passive observation using the naked eye is any more likely to screw up the universe than passive observation using any number of more scientific methods. If so, just by existing we would cause all the same problems.
If observation by a human really does affect the universe, the most likely explanation is that we're all characters in a super-being's game of Populous.
College degrees are bought with money and earned by being a sycophant. They mean nothing to me. More often than not, they'll count against you when interviewing with me.
It doesn't matter to me, or I wouldn't be running Debian on my slug and I wouldn't have soldered new RAM chips and a serial port header in. But it does matter to some people, I just wondered exactly what was meant by "officially supported".
I've just read you post three times and I'm pretty sure you just said you had to throw a computer away because the disk started making a funny noise. You didn't really mean that, did you? No. Nobody with enough nouse to have development and testing as part of their job would do that, surely. Or are you a.NET developer?
Erm, by your definition doesn't every application ever written have the same "memory leak"? They all allocate (or get allocated) some memory which isn't freed till the application exits.
I'm using a Linksys NSLU2 as a NAS. I've wiped it of the original Linksys firmware and installed the officially supported ARM version of Debian Linux on it.
Officially supported by Debian, but it's not officially supported by Linksys/Cisco, is it?
My NSLU2 will happily max out (3 MiB / sec) my 802.11g network when talking to my Mac. Writing to an HFS+ disk image over NFS is about half that speed, but as pure NFS is much faster I'm not sure that's entirely the NSLU2's fault. Over a 100 Mbps LAN it gets about 6 MiB/sec, which is still not very fast, but is fine for unattended backups.
If you have an early NSLU2, you may need to de-underclock it to get the best performance. Newer ones don't need the surgery.
Go to office Depot or Staples or whatever the local office supply store is, buy out their entire stock of paper and number 2 pencils. Proceed to copy down bit for bit the content from your hard drive. If you write really small, you might be able to fit it in under $500 worth of supplies. For even greater redundancy, you can use clay and chisels, but thats just too time consuming for the average user.
If you wish to secure those backups you could try this scheme.
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Which corrupt hellhole do you live in? I think you'll find the overwhelming majority of first-world companies stay within the law, and they don't ever get applauded for it. Compliance with the law is the norm, not the exception.
IANAL, but I suspect it's per violation, not per unit. Each unit contains code from many projects. Not providing the source for the Linux kernel they used would be one violation. Not providing the source for the Busybox they used would be another and so on and so on. [I don't know exactly what they actually used, they're just examples]
Incidentally, according to the GPL it doesn't matter if they modified the source or not, they have to provide the source they used to anyone to whom they provided the binary.
I would help out with the OLPC, but I guess I'm just not nice enough to make a pure cash donation or I would have done. I was all ready to go for the give-one-get-one, but for whatever reason they don't care about the $200 they would have got from me, or my (modest) skills writing code and offering support, because I'm one of the 93% of the planet's population who don't live in the US or Canada. So instead of my cash funding a laptop for a kid in the developing world it's going to end up lining the pockets of first-world shareholders. *shrug*
Actually, it's usually a civil matter.
But Microsoft don't price competitively. They charge 5-12 times what GameSpy charge for the same service and infinitely more than Sony and Nintendo. $5-10 a month would be reasonable for access to high quality hosted servers and $0 per month would be reasonable to allow you to play directly using an XBox as the server. AFAIK, there is no option but XBox Live Gold if you want to play on-line, you can't just type in the IP of your clan server or find a free, public server.
Bittorrent is good for P2P and non-profit stuff (Linux ISOs, for example), but for commercial content distribution I feel the same way as I do about XBox Live - they can either pay me (in the form of a discount) to cover the cost of the bandwidth I'm providing or pay for their own f*ing bandwidth.
A 3-month game card (the link I found to the 12 month was broken and the "sign up" link on the UK XBox site does nothing when I click on it) costs £15 (~$30). And for something you get for free (PS3, DS, Wii) or for $10 per year (Gamespy) elsewhere, yes, $5-10 a month is substantial.
Wouldn't it be even better if for your substantial monthly subscription Microsoft provided the servers, which could thereby be guaranteed adequate bandwidth and good latency (at least to the backbone)? It's absurd that you pay money to Microsoft then have to host the damn games on your own system.
It's not that what he said is categorically false, it's that it's not categorically true, which is what he claimed. He didn't say "I suspect..." or "I have information which may suggest...", he said "X has done [very serious illegal thing]" with essentially no evidence, certainly no proof, that that is the case. For a lawyer to make claims like that, they had better be very fucking sure they're right and able to prove they're right.
What a defeatist attitude. Why not try to change it into the world in which you want to live? You can be damn sure someone else is trying to change it into the world they want to live in, which may well be at odds with the world you want to live in, so if you just "learn to live with it" you're setting yourself up to be shat on from a great height.
If you don't like the idea of personal information being mined in this way, talk to your friends and write to your elected representatives. Try to raise awareness, get the law changed to raise the bar for what it considered "personally identifiable", increase the funds available for enforcement of breaches of personal privacy; there are a number of things you can do to push the world in the direction you want. Alone you might not achieve much, but if you never try you'll never know how un-alone you are in your views. Excepting natural events (which we can increasingly control too), all the things which have changed in human society were changed by people. If you just learn to live with whatever changes, you'll never be one of those people who decide how things change. At the absolute minimum, vote.
I had (still have, in fact) a Sony NW-E3 which would only play ATRAC-3 files, not MP3. Given that was my only digital music at the time (this was the late 90s), it wasn't a major problem. It was half the size of the competition and had the best interface I've ever used on a portable device (a twiddly knob on the top, with a play/pause button in the middle - not that there was much skipping about with only 64 MiB of storage!). Many of their phones of the same era had a jog-dial, which was a similarly awesome interface. Now that compatibility between devices is more important that a decade ago I've given up on Sony.
I'd like a keyboard for my 770 too. Is it the iGo Stowaway you're talking about? Looks nice, pity it's about the same price I paid for my (new) 770 :/
I guess the business need is the same as the business need for $100k company cars for your executives rather than $20k ones.
In what way is a slow, expensive desktop machine (your laptop in a docking station) the best of the desktop world?
I've never understood why some people think having an uninteligible sliver of /. (or whatever) appearing between a toolbar and a document is a good thing.
It's quite clear that by "random", they meant "(psuedo-)randomly selected", which is a common and accepted use of "random".
If observation by a human really does affect the universe, the most likely explanation is that we're all characters in a super-being's game of Populous.
Why the huge chip on your shoulder?
*cough* Budweiser.
It doesn't matter to me, or I wouldn't be running Debian on my slug and I wouldn't have soldered new RAM chips and a serial port header in. But it does matter to some people, I just wondered exactly what was meant by "officially supported".
I've just read you post three times and I'm pretty sure you just said you had to throw a computer away because the disk started making a funny noise. You didn't really mean that, did you? No. Nobody with enough nouse to have development and testing as part of their job would do that, surely. Or are you a .NET developer?
Erm, by your definition doesn't every application ever written have the same "memory leak"? They all allocate (or get allocated) some memory which isn't freed till the application exits.
Officially supported by Debian, but it's not officially supported by Linksys/Cisco, is it?
My NSLU2 will happily max out (3 MiB / sec) my 802.11g network when talking to my Mac. Writing to an HFS+ disk image over NFS is about half that speed, but as pure NFS is much faster I'm not sure that's entirely the NSLU2's fault. Over a 100 Mbps LAN it gets about 6 MiB /sec, which is still not very fast, but is fine for unattended backups.
If you have an early NSLU2, you may need to de-underclock it to get the best performance. Newer ones don't need the surgery.
If you wish to secure those backups you could try this scheme.
Since 3.1? Was Windows 1.0 really good then? Except in Nebraska, of course.