Governments continue to tax more and more and it's time the people of this country make their position known -- we won't stand for it any longer.
Make it clear to these bozos in Washington and your local state that if they vote for this, they vote their demise. And them get off yer duff to make it so by participating in _your_ government.
Oh Microsoft, you don't get it, let me count the ways.
Bad-mouthing Linux doesn't work. It fails because people _like_ Linux, and Linux _works_. What else can you say? Trying to tell people that a free operating system has a higher cost of ownership than their product which costs hundreds or thousands of dollars makes Microsoft look foolish. Arguing that "you'll need to pay people to maintain it" is almost laughable.
Microsoft, the life cycle of your products is deplorable. It used to be that businesses were willing to cede that due to hardware advances, they'd have to replace office PCs every 3-5 years. That's no longer the case. The office staff will hardly tell a difference between a Celeron 800 and the new Pentium 4 machines. So, businesses are finally going to get some realistic life out of the investment. However, Microsoft still wants to maintain the same life cycle of their operating systems. Even worse, if you don't fit into their upgrade schedule, you have security problems that are likely to be unresolved as your version of their OS retires. Microsoft, people are understanding that the insecurities of your operating system _work in your favor_ to promote the obscenely short life-cycles of your product.
Microsoft fails to understand that their money grab in licensing changes, their unmitigated gall at calling their customers thieves via the BSA and many other ways of annoying the IT managers through-out the world has -- Microsoft, get ready for the clue here --
_alienated customers_!
That's right. Microsoft, take a long hard look at the likes of large monopolistic phone companies and see why people will opt for something that's not necessarily better, but tolerable in order to eliminate the intolerable dealings with Microsoft.
I ran their Linux client on a couple machines and it ran ok, didn't impact things too badly (remember "nice"?). But when it went to upload the finished results, it could never connect to the server that takes the finished data.
After two weeks of that, I pulled the client down. No one bothered to respond to my email, one person pointed to a discussion group for assistance, but since I'm already being overly generous with my time, it was more bother than it was worth.
This is another "that's cool, now where's my free stuff for attending" performance from Microsoft.
Under the right applications and circumstances, it would eliminate the repetitive type, move-hand, mouse, click, move-hand, type, move-hand, mouse, click, type nonsense that's such a pain in the neck.
However, I can't see anyone with average or better typing skills using this for anything more than reducing the amount of work to scroll pages.
Based upon my experiences with a iPaq, handwriting notes system is just too klunky. Obviously increasing the size to a tablet would really help that, but I can't imagine myself ditching the keyboard and using this for anything but checkboxes and scrolling.
If Microsoft really wants a winning innovation, how about eliminating the nagging fear I have each and every time I open an email in Outlook from someone I do not know. Now that would truly be useful!
The license application for the 8VSB signal had to have gone through an FCC attorney, who would want the engineering reviewed by a consulting engineer. This is partially the fault of the consulting engineer, and mostly the fault of the FCC in not anticipating tropo.
The irony is in the fact that digital television is supposed to be predicated on the television stations giving up their VHF allocations for other purposes. The other purposes are digital communications for public safety -- police.
So until the VHF channels are vacated and the equipment manufacturers actually have type-accepted equipment for the new bands, the police in this community are basically screwed.
Or maybe they need to get a STA (special temporary authorization) and retune their equipment and get a new frequency.
First, while I see why the author is concerned, the article is long on fud short on supportive substance on how the industry wants to control the consumer other than stopping bandwidth hogs and abuse with P2P systems.
The immediate issue is that there isn't a viable economic model that allows anyone to sell you a 1.54 megabits of bandwidth for what a residential customer can afford or would pay. Unfortunately, the cable companies have only themselves to blame for this situation by giving people just that and then trying to figure out how to make money at it after the fact.
All you can eat pricing only works where there's some form of physical limitation to the level of consumption. In a restaurant, it's the size of a person's stomach. In the Internet world, it was formerly the limits of dial-up.
While it seems entirely unfair that the cable companies would want some form of tiered pricing, it's a fact of life. There's no reason that someone who downloads 200 gigabytes of data per month should pay the same low rate for someone that uses their broadband connection to hang out on Slashdot, check out a little porn, read their email and move along with their life. In fact, I argue that permitting this type of use without charging more for it is patently unfair to the low-level users.
The other thing the high-consumption bandwith users need to consider is that the cable companies hope to woo in the customers that wouldn't mind the speed boost, but do not use the Internet enough to justify paying more than $20 per month. The cable companies need this customer desperately, and without these customers the high-consumption customer is going to be faced with paying even more for their connectivity.
One thing that the article does not mention is that there does appear to be some form of attempt by Comcast to stop people from using VPNs on their network. Sometimes VPN software works, sometimes it doesn't. Calls to their support desk is met with "that's an unsupported software feature, you need to get a business account". Too bad it wasn't discussed in the article, because that is a disturbing trend in providing network access. It seems to me that what ports you use and what software you use is immaterial to providing an Internet connection. Although, we all know why Comcast would prevent the use of VPNs.
I've maintained for a long-time that the telcos would much rather have residential customers on wireless as opposed to landline. The residential landline service has been subsidized by business customers for decades, and the telcos are salivating over the prospect of putting that money into the profit column.
Since all the RBOC's have their own wireless ventures, changes in pricing structures would prompt the most upwardly mobile (meaning "has discretionary income") customers to transition from landline to mobile. This moves potentially highly profitable customers from a fixed-rate service to a service that is more useage-based. Sure you get 3,000 minutes per month on your cell phone, but even when the billing is the same, the telco should eventually get a return on not having to manage so much copper in residential areas. Or, at the very least, freeing up some of the infrastructure from voice circuits allows the pairs to be used for DSL/other services without the incredulous expense of sending big burly men out to string more cable.
That may not seem like a big deal until you consider that many of the residential areas are using copper that's been hanging on poles or in the wet ground for more than 40 years. Getting away from or recycling for other purposes the existing buried infrastructure seems to be very forward thinking, which would appear to be out of character for telcos.
The mere fact that they recommended 7200 rpm Western Digital drives for their high performance system gives me the impression they haven't a clue.
I disagree with the assertion that a 10,000 rpm SCSI drive is more prone to failure than a 7,200 IDE drive because it "moves faster". I've had far more failures with cheap IDE drives than with SCSI drives. Not to mention that IDE drives work great with minor loads, but when you start really cranking on them, the bottlenecks of IDE start to haunt the installation.
A couple reasons come to mind as to why this Open Spectrum nonsense won't work and won't be applied.
First and most importantly, the federal government rakes in tons of money from spectrum auctions and licensing fees. However arcane, that simply won't be eliminated because something "better" has come along that's in the interest of the people. Reducing taxes are in the interest of the people, and we know how resistant the government is to that!
Despite what the author believes, spectrum allocations are a sane way to managing RF. Granted, spread spectrum doesn't interferre with other transmissions *when technically sound methods are used*. But when left to their general devices, the public sometimes eschews technically sound ideas and does stupid things. No matter how robust spread spectrum claims to be, when the front-end of the receiver is overloaded because of a dirty transmitter down the block, things quit working.
I've never had to DF (direction find) a spread spectrum transmitter, but I suspect that it's a far cry more difficult than finding a spur created from a faulty paging server.
I suspect that the people mentioned in the article are using power levels not even remotely close to being able to cause the issues discussed.
Furthermore, if you're able to produce arcing and cause fluorescent tubes to light, you can forget about the data portion because you have a serious RF problem. That would be, you're lacking an effective antenna. All that power should be going out into the antenna, not into the router room.
I've worked in broadcast facilities where the combined output of all the transmitters on site was well over a 500,000 watts (that's not ERP). Not once did we have the issues you mentioned, and although I now have a third-eye, I find it helpful when typing and reading documentation at the same time.
This ties amateur ax.25 protocols directly to the Linux kernel. Works great, lasts a long time.
I suspect the "commercial" modems in use were transmitting in something other than ax.25, probably sitor/amtor/pactor, but it's all about the same at 300 baud.
The advantage with Linux is that you have to configure one driver for tcp/ip as opposed to dealing with the mgetty and ppp nonsense in the article.
The mere thought that knowledge is criminal is patently absurd. This nonsense is further proof that US corporations prefer the American public as dumb as possible.
A preferably dumb American consumer is simply fuel for the machine. Don't ask, just pay us and thank us for providing you with insert good or service here?.
Hopefully, within the Supreme Court, will see that the rights of free speech trump this ridiculous law.
Microsoft is living proof that with enough creative marketing, you truly can wrap a turd in colored foil and call it candy!
Some people may see this as insignificant in light of all the other corporate scandals in the world. However, it's just one more instance of Microsoft treating their customers and/or prospective customers as bafoons.
Many companies have fallen on hard times because they failed to respect the intelligence of their customers. The *only* thing keeping people from ditching Microsoft like a bad habit is the lack of anything comparable. That day will come, and Microsoft will surely rue it.
Re-read the article, it's a Rochester Hills Michigan woman, working for a law firm in Berkley Michigan as posted at www.freep.com. Also known as, the Detroit Free Press.
The article did not state the penalties involved if you are guilty of spamming pagers and cell phones, but the sad fact is that I'm sure they are woefully inadequate.
In Michigan, there's a law on the books concerning junk faxes. Yes, it's illegal to send unsolicited faxes of any sort in the state of Michigan. The penalty? $500 or the cost of the supplies used in receiving the fax *which ever is less*.
C'mon, what a toothless law.
Spam, junk faxes all fall into the "weather" category in as much as "everyone complains about the weather, but no one seems to do anything about it". Well fellow consumers, unlike the weather, you *can* do something about it.
It's quite simple. Don't do business with companies that engage in such practices. Let them know, and vote with your wallet.
Unfortunately, sheeple continue to tolerate practices that they readily acknowledge as annoying.
Despite being a little more resource intensive than ext3, XFS has to be one of the better file systems available. I've used it (obviously) on SGI's and it's been outstanding, and opted to use it before ext3, JFS and Reiserfs (although I believe Reiserfs is just as nifty).
Having it accepted into the kernel makes upgrades a world easier, and hopefully I'll be able to move away from SGI's modified Red Hat installation. Although, I doubt Red Hat will support it out of the box.
The other issue that needs fixing with XFS is the lack of an emergency boot disk. XFS enabled kernels are huge, and that creates a slight problem when booting from floppy.
Re:Mosfet.org updated about why this is bad
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Here we go!
This is demonstrates exactly what I mentioned in my previous post. Instead of taking what good can be harvested out of the Red Hat changes, KDE developers have their panties in a bunch for people tresspassin' in their 'hood.
Give me a break! I've worked in the television industry for almost 10 years, I've seen a lot of big b-i-g B-IG egos in that time. But I've never seen such big egos with such a childish slant.
It's not about promoting Linux, it's about promoting and controlling your little cyber-kingdom and territory.
The people in Redmond must be rolling on the floor over this one, they know they have nothing to fear from these bozos.
A Much To-Do About Nothing!
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 4, Redundant
Jesus H. Jumping Christ! Can we stop this nonsense of which window manager is better? This does nothing productive, and it cements the perception that people who use Linux on the desktop do so because they have nothing better to do between Star Trek/Star Wars conventions.
KDE and Gnome have their merits, and I use one or the other frequently. The bad news is that I still maintain a Windows2000 partition simply because neither one is "there" yet.
I'm sure that the energy wasted in this non-issue would be better served creating an environment where my parents could get XF86 working. The damned thing intimidates me, I can't imagine what it's like to someone trying out Linux for the first time.
It's time the Open Source development teams quit putting up barbed-wire around their little camps and just get on with making their stuff better. These out-bursts remind me of the little cliques you saw in BBS chat rooms in the '90's.
You can deal with this by moaning online, or you can organize a grassroots effort to let the media companies know that you simply will not tolerate this. That means you simply do not buy their "stuff" on the general principle that they are pissing you off.
No CDs, no movies, no DVDs, nothing. If everyone gets involved, they'll get the concept that the consumers are tired of their nonsense and indeed are not the sheep they are purported to be.
How about working on emulators so the tons of old game cartridges you see at flea markets and swaps can be used again.
The hardware of an Atari2600 or an original Nintendo system were only fairly or moderately impressive when they were state of the art. However, the programming involved to eek every ounce of performance out of the hardware is simply gorgeous. Yeah, the graphics sucked, and were made worse when you pumped it through a modulator and rf generator to display it on channel 3, but impressive nevertheless.
It's fun to play these games because they programmers didn't have unlimited memory for use nor to store the finished result.
This has less to do with the video game company and more to do with advertising in general. In order to get heard above the increasing din of pitches and advertising, companies are resorting to ever-increasing and controversial tactics.
Today I sat through 13 *previews* and 8 ads in the movie theatre. More than 35 minutes of captivity in the theatre alone. Now the broadcasters want to devote the lower quarter of my screen to advertising, I caught a cable station (TNN) doing pop-ups for American Express and Time-Warner cable just won't leave me alone about their AOL high-speed access.
The issue is that the guilty parties have to make more money each quarter to keep Wall Street off their backs. Wall Street better get ready for a consumer revolt, because I'm getting tired of it all.
Slashdot Mirror
No more taxes. Really, when is enough enough?
Governments continue to tax more and more and it's time the people of this country make their position known -- we won't stand for it any longer.
Make it clear to these bozos in Washington and your local state that if they vote for this, they vote their demise. And them get off yer duff to make it so by participating in _your_ government.
Oh Microsoft, you don't get it, let me count the ways.
Bad-mouthing Linux doesn't work. It fails because people _like_ Linux, and Linux _works_. What else can you say? Trying to tell people that a free operating system has a higher cost of ownership than their product which costs hundreds or thousands of dollars makes Microsoft look foolish. Arguing that "you'll need to pay people to maintain it" is almost laughable.
Microsoft, the life cycle of your products is deplorable. It used to be that businesses were willing to cede that due to hardware advances, they'd have to replace office PCs every 3-5 years. That's no longer the case. The office staff will hardly tell a difference between a Celeron 800 and the new Pentium 4 machines. So, businesses are finally going to get some realistic life out of the investment. However, Microsoft still wants to maintain the same life cycle of their operating systems. Even worse, if you don't fit into their upgrade schedule, you have security problems that are likely to be unresolved as your version of their OS retires. Microsoft, people are understanding that the insecurities of your operating system _work in your favor_ to promote the obscenely short life-cycles of your product.
Microsoft fails to understand that their money grab in licensing changes, their unmitigated gall at calling their customers thieves via the BSA and many other ways of annoying the IT managers through-out the world has -- Microsoft, get ready for the clue here --
_alienated customers_!
That's right. Microsoft, take a long hard look at the likes of large monopolistic phone companies and see why people will opt for something that's not necessarily better, but tolerable in order to eliminate the intolerable dealings with Microsoft.
...my completed results could be sent.
I ran their Linux client on a couple machines and it ran ok, didn't impact things too badly (remember "nice"?). But when it went to upload the finished results, it could never connect to the server that takes the finished data.
After two weeks of that, I pulled the client down. No one bothered to respond to my email, one person pointed to a discussion group for assistance, but since I'm already being overly generous with my time, it was more bother than it was worth.
This is another "that's cool, now where's my free stuff for attending" performance from Microsoft.
Under the right applications and circumstances, it would eliminate the repetitive type, move-hand, mouse, click, move-hand, type, move-hand, mouse, click, type nonsense that's such a pain in the neck.
However, I can't see anyone with average or better typing skills using this for anything more than reducing the amount of work to scroll pages.
Based upon my experiences with a iPaq, handwriting notes system is just too klunky. Obviously increasing the size to a tablet would really help that, but I can't imagine myself ditching the keyboard and using this for anything but checkboxes and scrolling.
If Microsoft really wants a winning innovation, how about eliminating the nagging fear I have each and every time I open an email in Outlook from someone I do not know. Now that would truly be useful!
I just bought an HP49G and guess what, it has RPN. And I use RPN because I like it.
The license application for the 8VSB signal had to have gone through an FCC attorney, who would want the engineering reviewed by a consulting engineer. This is partially the fault of the consulting engineer, and mostly the fault of the FCC in not anticipating tropo.
The irony is in the fact that digital television is supposed to be predicated on the television stations giving up their VHF allocations for other purposes. The other purposes are digital communications for public safety -- police.
So until the VHF channels are vacated and the equipment manufacturers actually have type-accepted equipment for the new bands, the police in this community are basically screwed.
Or maybe they need to get a STA (special temporary authorization) and retune their equipment and get a new frequency.
First, while I see why the author is concerned, the article is long on fud short on supportive substance on how the industry wants to control the consumer other than stopping bandwidth hogs and abuse with P2P systems.
The immediate issue is that there isn't a viable economic model that allows anyone to sell you a 1.54 megabits of bandwidth for what a residential customer can afford or would pay. Unfortunately, the cable companies have only themselves to blame for this situation by giving people just that and then trying to figure out how to make money at it after the fact.
All you can eat pricing only works where there's some form of physical limitation to the level of consumption. In a restaurant, it's the size of a person's stomach. In the Internet world, it was formerly the limits of dial-up.
While it seems entirely unfair that the cable companies would want some form of tiered pricing, it's a fact of life. There's no reason that someone who downloads 200 gigabytes of data per month should pay the same low rate for someone that uses their broadband connection to hang out on Slashdot, check out a little porn, read their email and move along with their life. In fact, I argue that permitting this type of use without charging more for it is patently unfair to the low-level users.
The other thing the high-consumption bandwith users need to consider is that the cable companies hope to woo in the customers that wouldn't mind the speed boost, but do not use the Internet enough to justify paying more than $20 per month. The cable companies need this customer desperately, and without these customers the high-consumption customer is going to be faced with paying even more for their connectivity.
One thing that the article does not mention is that there does appear to be some form of attempt by Comcast to stop people from using VPNs on their network. Sometimes VPN software works, sometimes it doesn't. Calls to their support desk is met with "that's an unsupported software feature, you need to get a business account". Too bad it wasn't discussed in the article, because that is a disturbing trend in providing network access. It seems to me that what ports you use and what software you use is immaterial to providing an Internet connection. Although, we all know why Comcast would prevent the use of VPNs.
Since when has Microsoft obeyed laws?
I've maintained for a long-time that the telcos would much rather have residential customers on wireless as opposed to landline. The residential landline service has been subsidized by business customers for decades, and the telcos are salivating over the prospect of putting that money into the profit column.
Since all the RBOC's have their own wireless ventures, changes in pricing structures would prompt the most upwardly mobile (meaning "has discretionary income") customers to transition from landline to mobile. This moves potentially highly profitable customers from a fixed-rate service to a service that is more useage-based. Sure you get 3,000 minutes per month on your cell phone, but even when the billing is the same, the telco should eventually get a return on not having to manage so much copper in residential areas. Or, at the very least, freeing up some of the infrastructure from voice circuits allows the pairs to be used for DSL/other services without the incredulous expense of sending big burly men out to string more cable.
That may not seem like a big deal until you consider that many of the residential areas are using copper that's been hanging on poles or in the wet ground for more than 40 years. Getting away from or recycling for other purposes the existing buried infrastructure seems to be very forward thinking, which would appear to be out of character for telcos.
The mere fact that they recommended 7200 rpm Western Digital drives for their high performance system gives me the impression they haven't a clue.
I disagree with the assertion that a 10,000 rpm SCSI drive is more prone to failure than a 7,200 IDE drive because it "moves faster". I've had far more failures with cheap IDE drives than with SCSI drives. Not to mention that IDE drives work great with minor loads, but when you start really cranking on them, the bottlenecks of IDE start to haunt the installation.
A couple reasons come to mind as to why this Open Spectrum nonsense won't work and won't be applied.
First and most importantly, the federal government rakes in tons of money from spectrum auctions and licensing fees. However arcane, that simply won't be eliminated because something "better" has come along that's in the interest of the people. Reducing taxes are in the interest of the people, and we know how resistant the government is to that!
Despite what the author believes, spectrum allocations are a sane way to managing RF. Granted, spread spectrum doesn't interferre with other transmissions *when technically sound methods are used*. But when left to their general devices, the public sometimes eschews technically sound ideas and does stupid things. No matter how robust spread spectrum claims to be, when the front-end of the receiver is overloaded because of a dirty transmitter down the block, things quit working.
I've never had to DF (direction find) a spread spectrum transmitter, but I suspect that it's a far cry more difficult than finding a spur created from a faulty paging server.
I suspect that the people mentioned in the article are using power levels not even remotely close to being able to cause the issues discussed.
Furthermore, if you're able to produce arcing and cause fluorescent tubes to light, you can forget about the data portion because you have a serious RF problem. That would be, you're lacking an effective antenna. All that power should be going out into the antenna, not into the router room.
I've worked in broadcast facilities where the combined output of all the transmitters on site was well over a 500,000 watts (that's not ERP). Not once did we have the issues you mentioned, and although I now have a third-eye, I find it helpful when typing and reading documentation at the same time.
supports this already through the ax25 modules?
This ties amateur ax.25 protocols directly to the Linux kernel. Works great, lasts a long time.
I suspect the "commercial" modems in use were transmitting in something other than ax.25, probably sitor/amtor/pactor, but it's all about the same at 300 baud.
The advantage with Linux is that you have to configure one driver for tcp/ip as opposed to dealing with the mgetty and ppp nonsense in the article.
The mere thought that knowledge is criminal is patently absurd. This nonsense is further proof that US corporations prefer the American public as dumb as possible.
A preferably dumb American consumer is simply fuel for the machine. Don't ask, just pay us and thank us for providing you with insert good or service here?.
Hopefully, within the Supreme Court, will see that the rights of free speech trump this ridiculous law.
Microsoft is living proof that with enough creative marketing, you truly can wrap a turd in colored foil and call it candy!
Some people may see this as insignificant in light of all the other corporate scandals in the world. However, it's just one more instance of Microsoft treating their customers and/or prospective customers as bafoons.
Many companies have fallen on hard times because they failed to respect the intelligence of their customers. The *only* thing keeping people from ditching Microsoft like a bad habit is the lack of anything comparable. That day will come, and Microsoft will surely rue it.
"first crash-resistant, high-performance file system "
Possibly, but you won't beat XFS for its high performance file system. Period. End of discussion.
XFS cleanly handles files that would choke your beloved BSD.
Moreso, it's *POSIX* compliant. But then, the BSD crowd never did care about POSIX.
Re-read the article, it's a Rochester Hills Michigan woman, working for a law firm in Berkley Michigan as posted at www.freep.com. Also known as, the Detroit Free Press.
The article did not state the penalties involved if you are guilty of spamming pagers and cell phones, but the sad fact is that I'm sure they are woefully inadequate.
In Michigan, there's a law on the books concerning junk faxes. Yes, it's illegal to send unsolicited faxes of any sort in the state of Michigan. The penalty? $500 or the cost of the supplies used in receiving the fax *which ever is less*.
C'mon, what a toothless law.
Spam, junk faxes all fall into the "weather" category in as much as "everyone complains about the weather, but no one seems to do anything about it". Well fellow consumers, unlike the weather, you *can* do something about it.
It's quite simple. Don't do business with companies that engage in such practices. Let them know, and vote with your wallet.
Unfortunately, sheeple continue to tolerate practices that they readily acknowledge as annoying.
Vote with your wallet.
Despite being a little more resource intensive than ext3, XFS has to be one of the better file systems available. I've used it (obviously) on SGI's and it's been outstanding, and opted to use it before ext3, JFS and Reiserfs (although I believe Reiserfs is just as nifty).
Having it accepted into the kernel makes upgrades a world easier, and hopefully I'll be able to move away from SGI's modified Red Hat installation. Although, I doubt Red Hat will support it out of the box.
The other issue that needs fixing with XFS is the lack of an emergency boot disk. XFS enabled kernels are huge, and that creates a slight problem when booting from floppy.
Here we go!
This is demonstrates exactly what I mentioned in my previous post. Instead of taking what good can be harvested out of the Red Hat changes, KDE developers have their panties in a bunch for people tresspassin' in their 'hood.
Give me a break! I've worked in the television industry for almost 10 years, I've seen a lot of big b-i-g B-IG egos in that time. But I've never seen such big egos with such a childish slant.
It's not about promoting Linux, it's about promoting and controlling your little cyber-kingdom and territory.
The people in Redmond must be rolling on the floor over this one, they know they have nothing to fear from these bozos.
Jesus H. Jumping Christ! Can we stop this nonsense of which window manager is better? This does nothing productive, and it cements the perception that people who use Linux on the desktop do so because they have nothing better to do between Star Trek/Star Wars conventions.
KDE and Gnome have their merits, and I use one or the other frequently. The bad news is that I still maintain a Windows2000 partition simply because neither one is "there" yet.
I'm sure that the energy wasted in this non-issue would be better served creating an environment where my parents could get XF86 working. The damned thing intimidates me, I can't imagine what it's like to someone trying out Linux for the first time.
It's time the Open Source development teams quit putting up barbed-wire around their little camps and just get on with making their stuff better. These out-bursts remind me of the little cliques you saw in BBS chat rooms in the '90's.
Ok geeks, here's the deal.
You can deal with this by moaning online, or you can organize a grassroots effort to let the media companies know that you simply will not tolerate this. That means you simply do not buy their "stuff" on the general principle that they are pissing you off.
No CDs, no movies, no DVDs, nothing. If everyone gets involved, they'll get the concept that the consumers are tired of their nonsense and indeed are not the sheep they are purported to be.
How about working on emulators so the tons of old game cartridges you see at flea markets and swaps can be used again.
The hardware of an Atari2600 or an original Nintendo system were only fairly or moderately impressive when they were state of the art. However, the programming involved to eek every ounce of performance out of the hardware is simply gorgeous. Yeah, the graphics sucked, and were made worse when you pumped it through a modulator and rf generator to display it on channel 3, but impressive nevertheless.
It's fun to play these games because they programmers didn't have unlimited memory for use nor to store the finished result.
To answer your question about the mpaa.org web site being up -- it isn't.
Appears to be slashdotted.
This has less to do with the video game company and more to do with advertising in general. In order to get heard above the increasing din of pitches and advertising, companies are resorting to ever-increasing and controversial tactics.
Today I sat through 13 *previews* and 8 ads in the movie theatre. More than 35 minutes of captivity in the theatre alone. Now the broadcasters want to devote the lower quarter of my screen to advertising, I caught a cable station (TNN) doing pop-ups for American Express and Time-Warner cable just won't leave me alone about their AOL high-speed access.
The issue is that the guilty parties have to make more money each quarter to keep Wall Street off their backs. Wall Street better get ready for a consumer revolt, because I'm getting tired of it all.